Readers are an essential part of my writing journey. I’d love to talk to you, even or especially if you don’t agree with something I’ve written. And if my writing connects with you, I’m interested in knowing why. Writing shouldn’t be a one-sided conversation.
Elena Lappin's life could be described as 'five languages in search of an author'. She now lives in London, but she was born in Russia and has lived in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Israel, Canada, and the United States. As a multiple émigré, her decision to write in English was the unexpected result of many wanderings, and this memoir tells the story of finding a voice in a language that is not one's own. Russian, Czech, German, Hebrew, and finally English: how do they, and the family roots and cultures they represent define who she is, and how has adopting English allowed her to be a writer?
Her supple prose is infused by warmth, tenderness and ebullience . . . An uplifting story
― Amanda Craig ― Observer
Natasha Kaplan, a giggly, overeducated thirty-something New Yorker, is now married and living in London. Her life seems quite settled until she accepts the job of editor on an Anglo-Jewish magazine called The Nose . Things here are not what they seem, and Natasha soon discovers that The Nose is a battlefield of near-mythic proportions. As she pieces together a shocking connection between the magazine's founder, the enigmatic Franz Held, and her own family's hidden past, history merges with the present and looms darkly over her life, incriminating in unexpected ways, its taint extending to the very people she loves most.
A natural storyteller...A fearlessly well-crafted mystery and a compelling novel.
― Times Literary Supplement
Funny, irreverent, dark, and tender – a startling and sexy debut collection. Women (and men) cope with foreign marriages in Elena Lappin’s shrewd domestic comedies of the absurd, set in London, New York, and a constellation of European and Israeli cities. Transplanted across oceans and ensconced in strange houses where appliances malfunction and husbands are not what they seem, women like Noa, Vera, and Paula settle into lives of persistently unfamiliar routine, stirred up from time to time with a very crooked stick. In ‘Noa and Noah’, Noa, an Israeli, has been married for two years before her English improves and she realizes that her British husband, Noah, is not a glamorous young businessman but a dull junior debt collector. In revenge she begins to frequent a nonkosher butcher-and that’s just the beginning. With perfect pitch and a poker face, Lappin writes insidiously funny tales about love and survival in an international no-man’s-land of marriage.
'An immensely likeable first collection . . . Lappin uses a lithe and frolicsome language full of entertainment'
― Liz Jenson, Independent