SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZEThe stories of Kseniya Melnik’s debut collection are small-town miracles, each a miniature epic.Their focus is Magadan, a town in the Northern Far East of Russia, and the unvisited lives of its inhabitants and emigrants – schoolchildren, doctors, teachers, mothers, daughters. Some characters span several stories. Some of their stories span decades and continents. The measure of their telling, though, is invariably the measure of everyday existence. Their...