In Soviet Russia the desire for freedom is also a desire for the freedom to love. Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance.
Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him – a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover.
As the dreary Brezhnev era gives way to Perestroika and the fall of Communism, the orphan uncovers the truth behind the life of Dmitri Ress, whose tragic fate embodies the unbreakable bond between love and freedom.
Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him – a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover.
As the dreary Brezhnev era gives way to Perestroika and the fall of Communism, the orphan uncovers the truth behind the life of Dmitri Ress, whose tragic fate embodies the unbreakable bond between love and freedom.
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Reviews
'Lives in the memory long after the last page is turned ... Makine's prose is both spare and meditative' Guardian.
'[Makine's] sombre, perceptive fiction reflects each ebb and flow; his quiet voice is unique ... he again articulates the profundity of human experience - no small feat' Irish Times.
'Makine's narrator paints a poignant, poetically charged picture of a repressive society, leavened only by the freedom and possibilities of love' Mail on Sunday.
'[A] poignant meditation on the moments of beauty that make a life worth living in conditions of institutionalised repression' Metro.
'Quiet moments of natural beauty and human tenderness ... This tendency to combine the disparate elements of experience into a single, resonant whole typifies a style at once spare and lyrical' Times Literary Supplement.