Spotlight & Giveaway: Games by Anna Maria Volkova

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Anna Maria Volkova’s new release: Games

Normal People meets Fifty Shades of Grey in this sharp and provocative coming-of-age debut chronicling the turbulent romance between a brilliant economics grad student and a magnetic Wall Street CEO two decades her senior.

When Lili Marwan—seeking to escape the unrelenting pressures of her master’s thesis, recent rejection from her foster family, and unresolved grief from the death of her parents—has an intense one-night stand with Aleksandr Petrov, her restless mind finally goes calm.

At twenty-two, Lili is already opinionated beyond her years: whether it’s astrology, democratic socialism, veganism, or the ravages of late-stage capitalism run rampant. But when a tall, dark stranger buys her a drink in a FiDi bar, she suddenly meets her match. Aleksandr is formidable, fiercely intelligent, and infuriatingly disarming. He’s also more than two decades older than her, a Capricorn with a birth chart full of red flags, a neoliberal capitalist, and a strong believer in the power of free markets, having escaped the Soviet Union in its dying days.

He’s the opposite of Lili in nearly every way. He challenges her at every turn. And she can’t stay away.

Over the course of a heady New York City summer, Lili and Aleksandr reach across the divide of their differences and the decades of their lives, discovering startlingly shared experiences. Their casual arrangement—rough sex, hours where Lili does not need to make any decisions—gives way fast to an unexpected intimacy, by turns breathtaking, then devastating.

As Lili struggles to understand herself and the complicated threads of her ambition, pain, and desire, she will have to decide: is she willing to risk great loss again, for the hope of profit that is finally within reach?

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from Games 

“Lili.”
A familiar voice. Like autumn, like wealth: a complicated warmth of old libraries, low laughter, heavy cuff links—
“Oh. Hi.”
In a banquette by the open window at Balthazar, it’s him.
“Please, join me,” Aleksandr says, folding his newspaper. He sets it down on the table beside a half-empty cup of coffee. His stare, clear and appraising, makes her flush.
Lili hovers in the street. She really shouldn’t.
Aleksandr inclines his head towards the empty seat across from him. Five minutes. She’ll stay for five minutes.
She ducks into the restaurant.
It’s too lavish and intense for breakfast—rich red leather seating, faded saffron walls, tarnished mirrors, high tin ceilings—but breakfast is what’s being ferried out around them, eggs Benedict and Bloody Marys, as she slides into the banquette.
“People actually eat here?” she asks. She musters a laugh, trying to diffuse whatever this is. The thread of something frantic thrums inside her. The hint of a smile at his lips tugs into a smirk. “Evidently. Coffee? Food?”
“Oh, no, I’m—”
“Another black coffee,” Aleksandr orders from the waiter who’s appeared. “The omelet, French toast, eggs en cocotte. Both of the eggs Benedict, too, and whatever pastries are freshest.”
The waiter departs, and Aleksandr looks back at her.
“So, Lili.” His tongue holds her name. “Do you usually run away after fucking?”
The obscenity in his accent—formal, clipped tones with the undercut of Russian roughness, his history she’s discovered in the days since that night, reluctant Google searches that end with her slamming her computer shut—is ungodly.
The waiter returns with her coffee. Aleksandr doesn’t look away, his faint smile unfaltering.
There are bruises on her hips, still. Shadows at her throat. She’d run her fingers over the marks just that morning, disappointed they were fading.

Lili grips the hot cup of coffee. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asks. “It’s the middle of the week.”
Aleksandr raises an eyebrow. “They can get by without me for a few hours.”
That mix of condescension and amusement should infuriate her. Instead, she wants to lie down and abdicate all agency; be forced to let go again, like she did that night.
She swallows, forcefully. “You know, your entire industry is evil,” Lili says, words clumsy. She’s acutely aware of the fact that she doesn’t look like she did that night. Her nose piercing is restored, dirt under her nails from extra work shifts she picked up over the last week at the farm, messy bun, short skirt with combat boots. She grasps for intellectual contention to exert distance, to push him back. “Helping the disgustingly rich get richer. All you do is entrench systems of oppression and inequality to benefit elites. Billionaires shouldn’t even exist.”
“Is that so?” he says. His arm rests on the back of the banquette, shoulders broad under the cut of his suit. Commanding space, it’s like he’s the center of this entire godforsaken restaurant. “What about you? What do you do?”
“I’m a radical anarchist freegan tarot card reader with a strong communist bent,” she deadpans. She tries not to stare at his fingers—his mouth—as he takes a drink of coffee; tries to smother all her want. “Eat the rich, all of that, you know.”
“I’d think the anarchism and communism incompatible,” he muses. Lili freezes.
“But I’m not clear on what the youth are espousing these days,” he concedes. “We were still passing around The German Ideology when I was an undergrad. Probably passé now.”
“Where’d you go to school?” she asks, before she can help herself.
“England. Then Boston.” He adjusts his sleeve, checking the fit of his cuff links in a habitual movement. Lili digs her nails into her palm.
“You didn’t answer,” he says. “What do you actually do?”
“Oh. Right. Um, grad school.”
“Studying what?”
“Economics,” she mutters.
Aleksandr grins, like he’s caught her. “And you needed a primer on shorting stocks from second-year analysts? Where are you studying?”
“Columbia.”
“Impressive.”
She instinctively tenses, but it doesn’t sound mocking at all. It sounds like he’s praising her.
Take it, sweetheart—there you go, come on, just like that—
She takes a hot swallow of coffee.
“What do you plan to do after that?” he asks. “You’re friends with Greene’s boy. Investment banking?”
“Hardly,” Lili retorts, bristling at him knowing anything about her, even if it’s just her friendship with James. She wonders what else he might have found out. “I’d like to actually do some good in the world—UNHCR, the Development Program, ECOSOC. Maybe dismantle the hegemony of Western capitalism as a sleeper agent within the World Bank or IMF. Undo some of the damage you’re doing.”
“What a saint.”
That is mocking. She frowns—about to retort—when her phone buzzes.
“Shit.” Jackie. “I have to go; I’m late for a friend—”
Aleksandr stands as she gets up, elegant where she scrambles. “Um,” she says, looking up at him. “So, I guess—bye—”
He plucks her phone out of her hand. He taps in a phone number, and then his own phone buzzes in his suit’s breast pocket. He takes it out, and smiles, before handing her phone back.
“Goodbye, Miss Marwan.”
When Lili’s halfway down the street, she looks back over her shoulder. His newspaper is up again, but he’s looking at her over it.
Aleksandr smirks, and she flushes.

Excerpt. ©Anna Maria Volkova. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
 
 

Giveaway: (3) Giveaway copies of GAMES by Anna Maria Volkova. US only.

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Meet the Author:

Anna Maria Volkova lives and works in New York City. Personal family histories from within the former Soviet Union and the Middle East inform her writing, as do her professional experiences. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, she studied history and political science. Games is her debut novel.

Games: A Love Story