Nadia Alekseeva was born in 1988 in the Moscow region. She studied drama and prose at the CWS School of Writing, published in "Youth", "Friendship of Peoples" and "New World". She became a short-lister of Lyubimovka and a finalist of the Lyceum Award. 'Midnight Girl' is the debut novel.In the spring of 2016, Muscovite Pavel goes to Valaam to look for relatives, restoring the history of forty years ago. In the seventies, there was a boarding school in the monastery on the island, where WWII veterans and their families lived out their lives. Semyon graduates from school there and dreams of becoming a doctor. His motorboat flies, spreading Ladoga on two white whiskers, and seals bask on the shallows, and bonfires pull from the shore, and the bell that survived the war buzzes. Very soon this world will collapse because of the shot of a Finnish rifle...'The salvation of the human soul depends on the person, although it rests on a miracle. Nadia Alekseeva has turned out a serious, reliable text, devoid of modern banter over everything, about our connection with the past, which not only does not break, but also becomes more and more closely intertwined with the present. This is a story about Orthodoxy as a job, sometimes physical, dirty, sad, but how else if human souls are far from sterile and sometimes abandoned, like the post-war inhabitants of Valaam.'Alexey Salnikov'The novel is like an archaeological dig, where the brush of a modern scientist carefully, in layers, cleans the earth from what is hidden in the depths. The excavation square is a whole island where time does not flow in the usual linear way, but swirling and bringing together a variety of destinies."Asya Volodina