Alina Adams

Alina Adams is a novelist, television producer, and former figure-skating researcher whose family history informs her fiction about Soviet Jewish experience. The Nesting Dolls follows connected generations of women from 1930s Odessa and Siberia through the Soviet restrictions of the 1970s and into contemporary Brighton Beach. The 2020 family saga centers especially on Daria, Natasha, and Zoe, showing how political systems and private choices echo through later lives. Adams was born in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States as a child. Before this novel, she wrote romance and mystery fiction and worked on sports and daytime television, including coverage connected to Olympic figure skating. The Nesting Dolls draws on historical research, remembered family stories, and the author’s habit of listening closely to conversations among older relatives. Its structure mirrors its title by revealing one life inside another, while its Russian Jewish setting gives each generation a different problem of education, migration, ambition, and belonging.