Vita Nostra
core novel 2007 Vita Nostra
Record
| First published | 2007 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.00 (24,100 ratings, collected 2026-08-25) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780063054158 |
Synopsis
Vita Nostra follows sixteen-year-old Sasha Samokhina, who meets a mysterious stranger while on a seaside vacation with her mother and, under his instruction, begins swimming out to a buoy at dawn each day, an act that leaves her vomiting gold coins afterward. The strange, unexplained ritual becomes her tuition for enrollment at an unusual and deeply isolating institute far from home, one that Sasha feels compelled, almost against her will, to attend. As she arrives and begins her studies, she finds the institute's methods punishing and its purpose deliberately opaque, forcing her to submit to a curriculum that demands far more from her, psychologically and physically, than any ordinary school ever could.
Where it sits
- Universe: Vita Nostra
- Series: Vita Nostra core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Sergey Dyachenko
- Author: Marina Dyachenko
Notes
- From the series record (Vita Nostra): Original Russian sequence (Metamorphoses) ran longer; the English-translation sequence (Julia Meitov Hersey, HarperVoyager) collects books 1, 4, and 5 of the Russian original as a self-contained trilogy, following the translator/publisher's own packaging rather than the Russian numbering.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series Vita Nostra: position 1 of 3: next Assassin of Reality (2021)
Sources
← Vita Nostra dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.