Men are worthless. Young and old, American and Russian, rich and poor — it matters not to the women who people Sana Krasikov's debut collection of stories, "One More Year." Regardless of educational background, personality type or other qualifications, these men prove themselves deficient in every measurable way, leaving their women — wives, girlfriends, mothers — alone to piece through the rubble, assess the damage, salvage the fragments of their shattered lives.

Which is not to say that the women are free of blame, either. It is their delusions — their relentless insistence on controlling their narratives, on telling us a particular story even as all indicators point elsewhere — that contribute to the collapse of their lives, like a souffle that deflates of its own excess weight. "One More Year" is a chronicle of their disappointments and a somber parade of their mistakes, each story building off the one that precedes it and anticipating the one that follows. The result is solemn, and sobering.

If each character here has a motto, a mantra they repeat to themselves to stay sane, it is "one more year." One more year to happiness, to success, to stability, wealth and security. "One more year" is what allows Krasikov's women, stuck in untenable situations, to endure against all odds. "Every year, you say 'It's one more year, one more year'!" Maia's teenage son screams at her in "Maia in Yonkers," turning a promise into an unfulfillable curse. Maia has left her son Gogi in Georgia while she takes care of an elderly American woman. But her efforts at achieving American success have only succeeded in driving a wedge between the American and Georgian halves of herself, and between herself and her son. Gogi's brief New York sojourn is plagued by his commodity-lust — he practically demands a $300 jacket from his mother — and his inability to be properly grateful for the luxuries she has provided for him. Gogi at least has the benefit of his youth to explain his callow, shabby behavior. The other men of "One More Year," being older, have no such justification.

Tatiana Krasikov Born in Ukraine, Sana Krasikov grew up in Georgia and in the United States. She now lives in New York.

Resurgent Russian nationalism, and its embrace of brutish manliness as an ideal, serves as a partial explanation for the egregious behavior of Grisha in "The Repatriates." Having dragged his wife Lera from New York's Westchester County suburbs back to Moscow, where big-box stores have advanced further into the city than the Nazis were ever able to, he promptly reveals his intentions to abandon her: "You're not among your americaners. Here they don't eviscerate a man for the crime of having a job." Her armor is easily dented by his assaults on the life they had jointly assembled in New York. "The house," he informs her, "was mine. I paid for it while you slept till noon." Lera pities a friend for "living too long inside a fantasyland of your own hopefulness," but she too has failed to protect herself from her own fantasies of placid, unchanging domesticity. Moscow itself is partially to blame; its ethos of "no decency and no fair play," as Lera sees it, contributes to her husband's slide into callousness.

None of the book's other men is much gentler, or kinder. Ryan, the newlywed husband of immigrant Anya in "Better Half," slaps her around and behaves like "a child who got all his power from being unpredictable and erratic." Rashid, whom Gulia has left behind in "Asal" because he refused to leave his wife, promises a fidelity he cannot possibly deliver. In "The Alternate," Victor calls Alina, daughter of his onetime flame, to revisit the decision he made to marry for a St. Petersburg housing permit, instead of for true love with her mother; in "There Will Be No Fourth Rome," Regina, who fled the United States for Russia after her lover cajoled her into a workplace indiscretion, warns her friend Nona not to toss away her medical training to serve as a glorified secretary for her married German lover's business, and almost destroys their friendship in the process. Men are always telling their women to take it easy — along with "love" and "waiting," one of the most regularly recurring words in "One More Year" is "relax" — even as they plan their getaways, or scheme to cheat the women out of what is rightfully theirs. Vigilance, not relaxation, is what is needed.

Waiting is the name of the game — waiting for green cards, waiting for a better job, waiting for men to leave their wives, waiting for them to grow up. Anya lives in a shabby apartment with fellow-transients, no longer at home but also not fully present in her adopted country. "She'd have to wait to pee. Everything in her life was about waiting," Anya thinks as the shower runs in the bathroom.

The other constant is storytelling; the women of "One More Year" insist on telling their own stories in their own fashion, even when conventional facts might indicate another tale altogether. "We weren't like other couples. We were obsessed with each other," the middle-aged Larisa tells her niece Regina in "There Will Be No Fourth Rome." "We were one of those couples who didn't need anybody else. That was the kind of love we had." All Regina can do is point out the obvious: "But he left you."

Krasikov has a compact set of concerns — immigrants, the yawning gulf between the United States and the former Soviet Union, jerks and the women who love them, the sweet ache of memory — and reshuffles her deck between deals. The cards themselves never change, only their order and frequency. Krasikov treats her story collection like a novel, each story piling a few more bricks, and a little more mortar, onto the edifice being constructed. The end result is impressively consistent and a bit uniform; the characters change names, and their biographies differ from story to story, but the basic setup never fluctuates. It is Regina who has the following thought, but it could just as easily have emerged from any other character in "One More Year": "People, when you got down to it, always ended up being so disappointing. Sooner or later you discovered something about them that would make you ashamed of what you had felt for them." The eternal disappointment of other people, and the effort to move past anger and confusion, are the fundamental motivating factors of the promising "One More Year." To become a superlative storyteller, and not merely a very good one, Krasikov must learn how to move past the disappointment herself and work in multiple registers. Without it, readers may seek to take her male characters' example and leave her behind.

Saul Austerlitz is a writer in New York.