Abstract
Expulsion & Other Stories consists of two parts: a novella followed by a group of short stories. But the main protagonists have one thing in common: they are all women coming of age in difficult times. In the short stories, set in post-Stalinist Russia, the women are confronted by dictatorship's mundane face -- a minor bureaucrat, a school teacher, a doctor. Nobody spells out the rules of survival to the young girls and women, yet each learns to play -- or pays the price, that of facing “expulsion”. The novella “Face” shares a similar motif of expulsion but takes the reader to a different place -- the urban sprawl and property greed of modern Vancouver.