M is a celebrated writer living in exile from her country – referred to only as “the beast” – which is waging war on its neighbour with missiles and fire from the skies. Definitively unmoored: from her home, her language, her work (she is in the midst of writer’s block), and haunted by the news and military dispatches, M – we are told – has forgotten to be who she was.

Thus, at the beginning of the book, she is counting on the temporary cloak of invisibility offered by a long-distance train journey to a writer’s festival, to try to find out who she has become. Instead, a series of missed connections and communications leaves her unexpectedly stranded in an unfamiliar town. Here, amid her bewilderment, an encounter with a nomadic circus troupe allows her to finally contemplate a form of reinvention, the tantalising prospect of a new life untethered from attachments in an upended world.

Stepanova’s wonderful In Memory of Memory (2021) was a weighty consideration of family legacy through objects and images; at first, this slim novella of disconnection appears markedly different. But a similar dream-like atmosphere prevails, and there are also thematic resemblances. Even as she fantasises of obliteration, M is pulled back to the past. She remembers the photograph of a distant relative in the locked home she has left behind. She remembers an old film from her childhood celebrating the circus as a triumphant collective. The sudden playing of horns in her new city recalls the reveille from the pioneer camp she attended as a child.

But this time, these memories are tinged with horror, inevitably and rapidly leading M to think about the beast and its workings. Given that Stepanova now lives in forced exile from Russia, having been a prominent critic of Putin’s regime, her character’s inability to emerge from her waking dream can be read as much as testimony as invention. As the book draws to a close, M recalls the famous Fool card from the Tarot deck, the one representing the figure of a jester. It’s an image that should signify new beginnings and new hopes. “Alas,” writes Stepanova, “it’s never as straightforward as that.”