WILDALONE

Thea Slavin is Princeton’s newest and possibly most gifted pianist. Homesick for her family in Bulgaria, she struggles with her unfamiliar American life and tries to navigate the sexual politics and academic challenges of the Ivy League system. So far, so Freshman.

When Thea lands her first high-profile concert performance, she finds herself in a complex but unstoppable love triangle with two very privileged but very different brothers, each of whom is hiding his own dark secrets. Yet secrets are nothing new to Thea; she is not the first Slavin daughter to attend Princeton. Her sister was a student some years ago, and disappeared in mysterious and unresolved circumstances.

As she encounters Dionysian practices at the college which mirror the Slavic legends of her homeland – particularly that of the Samodivi, or “wildalones,” forest witches who beguile and entrap men – Thea begins to unravel some of the mystery of her sister’s disappearance. When she discovers the devastating truth about the man she believes she loves and the sister she never quite knew, Thea finds she has a deathly choice to make.

A natural born storyteller, Krassi Zourkova grew up in Bulgaria and moved to the US in 1993 to study art history at Princeton. After college, she graduated from Harvard Law School and has been practicing finance law in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles where she currently lives.

Her poems have appeared in various literary journals, and her essay, Book Collecting in the Absence of Books, about compiling a personal library under Communist censorship, won first prize in essay contests at Princeton and Harvard. It’s no surprise that Krassi is an accomplished musician and was inspired by her love of Chopin and her national folklore for THE WILDALONE. She is fluent in English, Bulgarian, Italian, Russian and Spanish, and has a diploma in Business French from the Paris Chamber of Commerce.