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Bone China, or Letters Not about Love is an unconventional murder mystery that blends suspense with lyrical storytelling.
Its protagonist Mila Freeman is recovering from a broken leg when she receives the news that her old friend—an artist and human rights activist—has been found dead under suspicious circumstances. The death is officially ruled a suicide, but the truth lingers unresolved, seeping into Mila’s world despite her friends’ vow to avoid the subject.
What unfolds is a witty and haunting meditation on exile, nostalgia, fractured bodies, and lost loves. Through digressive folktales, etymologies, and a chorus of emails woven into the narrative, Bone China explores the tension between silence and revelation, grief and resilience, intimacy and estrangement.
A genre-defying novel, it invites readers into a mystery that is as much about memory and identity as it is about uncovering a death. With sharp wit and emotional depth, Bone China is perfect for readers who crave literary fiction that pushes boundaries while keeping them enthralled by the puzzle at its core.
“From a broken leg to a glorified crutch, Svetlana Boym transforms her medical treatment into a waking dream, casting herself as the Russian Baba Yaga, a witch with a bone leg. Between fiction and reality, the broken bone at the center of this story becomes a metaphor for other breaks. While on bedrest, Svetlana Boym embarks on a ghostly journey across Boston, Budapest, Moscow, New York, Sarajevo, St Petersburg, exploring the world’s fractures. Referring to other writers—Nicolai Gogol, Viktor Shklovsky and Vladimir Nabokov—Svetlana Boym wonders over and over in echo: ‘Who am I when I am alone?’ A rich, colorful, and fascinating novel.”
—Kristian Feigelson, Professor of Sociology, University Sorbonne Nouvelle, Research Fellow at NYU (Jordan Center)
“With wit, tenderness, and intellectual daring, Boym reflects on fractured bodies and fractured worlds. A modern Decameron, the book is crowded with friends—real neighbors and lovers, and no less real artists and writers, some living, some living on.”
—Cristina Vatulescu, Director, Center for the Humanities, New York University
“This, the last of Svetlana’s works, escorts us, via a set of recurring motifs, through a succession of non-linear episodes which traverse etymology, autobiography, fairy tale, detective story, poetry and cryptic observations on her own life and the passing of the old world into the new. Famed for her work on nostalgia, her writing will be read with delight into the far future.”
—Ron Roberts, Honorary Lecturer in Psychology, Kingston University, London, author of The Off-Modern, Psychology Estranged
List of Figures
Preface
Stephanie Sandler
Bones and Banishments
Friends and Freedoms
Blizzard Decameron, Night One: Little Mermaid, Marco Polo, and Captain Ahab
Articulations and Missing Articles
Claws of a Semi-Feral Cat
The Tongue Bone and a Touch of Intimacy
Letters Not About Love
Bone China and Immigrant Crazings
Blizzard Decameron, Night Two: Lolita and the Lame Dick
Placebo: Psyche and Cupid
X-Rays and Russian Fairy Tales
Break a Leg!
Blizzard Decameron, Night Three: Rear Window in Sarajevo
The Diary of Pain
Accident, MD
Phantom Limbs
Miracles, Moon Cats, and Sun Dogs
Legwork
Blizzard Decameron, Night Four: Apollo and Daphne in St. Petersburg
Panic, Tibia, Loneliness, and Solitude
Fibula of the Baboon and the Original Google Book
Convalescence
Funny Bone
Blizzard Decameron, Night Five: Musical Tibia: On the Anti-Narcissistic Origins of Art
Step into the Same River Twice