Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's fiction was blacklisted in the 70s, published in the late 80s, and lauded since the 90s, when she was shortlisted for the Russian Booker. She has gone on to win prize after prize, culminating in the Triumph, Russia's most prestigious award for lifetime achievement. Since the death of Solzhenitsyn, many regard her as Russia's greatest living writer. From the 19 dense, dark folk fables that make up this collection (her first work to be published in the UK), it's easy to see why.

These are Petrushevskaya's fantastical writings: urban folk tales, apocalypse aftermaths, surreal, sinister fairy stories. She has termed them her "Orchards of Unusual Possibilities". Dense with twists, they read like condensed Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam horror films, set in wintry Siberian forests and claustrophobic Soviet-era one-room apartments peopled by several generations and writhing with cats.

The characters are more often than not orphans, widows, widowers, grieving parents. They are defined by loss, unhappiness, bad luck, a scarcity of resources. But that doesn't mean they take their situations lying down. The family in "The New Robinson Crusoes" (her most famous story), following an unspecified civilisational collapse, take to living off the land in a dacha in an isolated village. When hordes of refugees arrive, they retreat to a hut they've built in the forest. The tale is grim, but the family's ability to cope and stay ahead is ultimately uplifting.

When they were written, the darkness in these dissident stories was too close to the bone to allow publication. But now modern Russia has an appetite for this kind of thing and it is to be hoped that her revival there will lead to her work becoming better known in the rest of the world.