Little Girl with a Book is a portrait of a small girl curled up reading, lit by a hard slab of light that falls across her face and down onto the open pages. She points at the text with one finger, fully absorbed, her fair hair catching the glow.

She wears a sleeveless dress in mauve and grey, and the space around her drops away into deep shadow with only a thin band of warm light behind. Alexey Slusar worked this in oil on canvas in 2022, 70 by 50 centimetres, with the strong light and dark contrast doing most of the work.