DEAR READER,

In my head, over the years, too many times to count by now, I have already composed this letter.

In that imaginary letter, to an imaginary reader, I describe the start of my writing journey. I was nine years old and had just devoured Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series. I hated the ending. I ripped a sheet of paper from my Lisa Frank notebook and wrote a letter to Tamora Pierce, demanding that she rewrite the story with a different ending, and threatening to rewrite it myself. Deep down, of course, I was angry that the series was over. Deep down, I didn’t want any ending at all.

But now, in my real letter, I’d rather share how I almost didn’t become a writer. In 2016 I was a stay-at-home mother with a two-year-old and a baby. Both were wailing in the back seat one day when an interview with Tamora Pierce came on the car radio. My childhood dream of being a published author could not have felt further away, but listening to Tamora Pierce, I remembered being nine years old. I remembered characters that felt so real that I had to try to change their lives. I remembered a story so powerful that I had to put my own pen to paper.

In that imaginary letter, I explain that I first fell in love with Russian culture through works of great Russian literature. That even today, when I return to those texts, there is still a sense of wonder. I am still learning; I am still falling in love. I explain that it was this enduring awe that led me to write a love story and family saga set against the backdrop of the countryside of Tolstoy and Chekhov; of revolutionary Russia; of the decades of Soviet rule.

But now, in my real letter, I want to tell you why I picked up those novels at such a young age. Throughout my childhood, my father, a professional martial artist, would spend months at a time training in martial arts in Moscow. I turned to books to try to under stand a place so far away it felt unreal. Russia is in the news today for the worst possible reasons; the actions of the current regime are abhorrent and tragic. But there is a culture and a history so rich and so vast behind it; there is so much awaiting discovery, and I hope that some of this can be found in the pages of The Last Russian Doll.

My imaginary letter is long and complex, going on for pages, detailing how my book came to be. It might read like a Russian epic in and of itself, there would be so many people involved, so many ups and downs. But it turns out that in my real letter, right now, the message is simple. In my real letter, there’s only one person that matters, and it isn’t even me. It’s you. Whatever the journey has been, the reader is the destination. Thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy the story.