Moonlight in Odessa - Janet Skeslien Charles

AS READ ON BBC RADIO FOUR

WINNER OF THE MELISSA NATHAN AWARD FOR COMEDY ROMANCE

A tragicomic look at the flourishing market for e-mail order brides, Moonlight in Odessais a novel about the choices and sacrifices that people make in pursuit of love and stability, and the lengths that we will go to to help - and hinder - each other in search of a happy ending.

Odessa, Ukraine, is the humour capital of the former Soviet Union, but with prices rising and employment prospects falling, there is little for Odessans to laugh about. After months of searching, Daria, twenty-three and armed with an engineering degree and perfect English, is offered a plum job as a secretary at a foreign company. But there's a stone in every plum, and in this case it's her new boss Mr. Harmon, who makes it clear that sleeping with him should be the first item on her to-do list.

Loath to give up her newfound perks (the taste of real coffee, a new apartment and a salary she and her grandmother can actually live on), Daria manages to evade Harmon's advances by recruiting her neighbour, the slippery Olga, to be his mistress - a plan that ends up working only too well…

And so Daria finds herself moonlighting as an interpreter at Soviet Unions?, a dating agency specializing in finding gorgeous Odessan brides for lonely Americans. Daria - so adept at spotting the cracks in the relationships she facilitates - soon discovers that she is not immune to the temptations of the American dream herself. An email correspondence with an apparently shy and sensitive American teacher who offers her a new life in San Francisco, leaves her facing a choice between her beloved city - not to mention the attentions of Vlad, a worryingly attractive mafia gangster - and her long-dreamt-of escape to the land of the free.