A Bagful of Stories

These three new tales by Olga Grushin - commissioned specially for BBC Radio 4 - touch upon the lives of five generations and explore the effects of time on one Russian family.

" ... I found a small alarm clock with square black numbers and a picture of a tiny butterfly in the middle of its round face, I took it.

"The hands didn't move at first, but my mother said you just had to wind it; only when she did, I saw that it was broken, because the second hand ran backward, and if you stared at the clock long enough to notice, so did the minute hand."

Programme 3. A Bagful of Stories
Returning to Moscow after wartime evacuation, Elena leaves her bag behind on the platform of a provincial railway station. But what did the bag really contain?

Olga Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971 and spent her childhood in Moscow and Prague. In 1989 she became the first Soviet citizen to enrol for a full-time degree in the United States while retaining Soviet citizenship. In 2006 she was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers and named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists in 2007. She has published two novels: The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006) and The Concert Ticket (2010). Her story 'The Homecoming' featured in the series 'Platform Three' on Radio 4 (2010) and The Dream Life of Sukhanov was a Book At Bedtime in 2012. Olga lives in Washington D.C.

Reader: Ruth Gemmell
Producer: Jeremy Osborne
A Sweet Talk production for BBC Radio 4.