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Human Love
Love for another person. Love for humanity as a whole. Are the two compatible or mutually exclusive? In his most ambitious novel since Dreams of My Russian Summers, Andreï Makine takes us into the heart of Africa. His hero is Elias Almeida, a black revolutionary whose father was killed when Elias was still a child, and whose mother, to feed him, was forced to prostitute herself. Saved from death by a Catholic priest, Elias becomes a brilliant pupil destined for greatness. However, the memory of his parents turns him into an important cog in the worldwide revolutionary movement, sending him to Cuba and the Soviet Union to be trained for espionage and sabotage. He begins in his native Angola, still struggling to liberate itself from the colonial yoke, and moves to other political hot spots. But what happens when a black revolutionary dedicated to bettering the world falls in love with a white woman who wants only to live a peaceful, simple life?
Dreams Of My Russian Summers
This international bestseller has been translated into 26 languages and is the first work to win both of France's top literary honors. "A masterpiece. . . . Makine belongs on the shelf of world literature--between Lermontov and Nabokov, a few volumes down from Proust".--"The Atlanta Journal".
The Life of an Unknown Man
'It is impossible to exaggerate the power of this short, unbearably poignant novel.' Mail on Sunday 'A bold and elegant novel' Helen Dunmore, Guardian 'A haunting story, beautifully told' Viv Groskop, Observer An extraordinary story of love and endurance during the Siege of Leningrad lies at the heart of a magnificent novel about Russia past and present, and the human condition. One night in St Petersburg, two men meet, both adrift in the brash new Russia: Shutov, a writer visiting after years of exile in Paris, and Volsky, an elderly survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and Stalin's purges. His life story - one of extreme suffering, courage and an extraordinary love - he considers unremarkable. To Shutov it is a revelation, the tale of an unsung hero that puts everything into perspective and suggests where true happiness lies.
Music of a Life
May 24, 1941: Alexeï Berg, a classical pianist, is set to perform his first solo concert in Moscow. But just before his début, his parents -- his father a renowned playwright, and his mother a famed opera singer -- are exposed for their political indiscretions and held under arrest. With World War II on the brink, and fearing that his own entrapment is not far behind, Alexeï flees to the countryside, assumes the identity of a Soviet soldier, and falls dangerously in love with a general officer's daughter. What follows is a two-decades-long journey through war and peace, love and betrayal, art and artifice -- a rare ensemble in the making of the music of a life.
Le Testament Francais
Locked behind the Iron Curtain, a young boy grows up bewitched by his French grandmother’s memories of Paris before the Great War. On her balcony overlooking the Siberian steppes, Charlotte Lemonnier fires her grandson’s imagination with tales of the great flood in 1910, of Proust playing tennis in Neuilly and the President dying in the arms of his mistress, of avenues lined with chestnut trees and elegant cafes. Charlotte’s vision of a paradise lost, though, is overlaid by her subsequent experience. As her grandson grows older, he learns how this remarkable woman survived the Russian revolution’s aftermath, Stalin’s purges and the horrors of the Second World War, gaining from her a portrait of the country drawn with an outsider’s eye. Yet for all the monstrosities of his native land, he realises he is proud to be Russian. Torn between two cultures, as an adolescent he turns his back on all things French. Then in his twenties he abandons the Soviet Union and eventually reaches Paris – where a startling revelation awaits him. This luminous, haunting novel traces a sentimental and intellectual journey that embraces the dramatic history of this century.
Music of a Life
A brief but extraordinarily powerful novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers and Requiem for a Lost Empire, Music of a Life is set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II. Alexeï Berg’s father is a well-known dramatist, his mother a famous opera singer. But during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s they, like millions of other Russians, come under attack for their presumed lack of political purity. Harassed and proscribed, they have nonetheless, on the eve of Hitler’s war, not yet been arrested. And young Alexeï himself, a budding classical pianist, has been allowed to continue his musical studies. His first solo concert is scheduled for May 24, ...
The Crime of Olga Arbyelina
A Russian princess, a refugee from the Bolsheviks, abandoned by a faithless husband, flees with her child to France, where she is subsequently found half-naked on a riverbank next to a body of a man with a terrible wound on his head.
The Woman Who Waited
A moving, utterly captivating love story: Romeo and Juliet as if told by Chekhov or Dostoevsky. In a remote Russian village a woman waits, as she has waited for almost three decades, for the man she loves to return. Near the end of World War II, nineteen-year-old Boris Koptek left the village to join the Russian army, swearing to the sixteen-year-old love of his life, Vera, that as soon as he returned they would marry. Young Boris, who with his engineering battalion fought his way almost to Berlin, was reported killed in action crossing the Spree River. But Vera refuses to believe he is dead, and each day, all these years later, faithfully awaits his return. Then one day the narrator arrives...
Once Upon the River Love
In the immense virgin pine forests of Siberia, where the snows of winter are vast and endless, sits the little village of Svetlaya. Once, the village had been larger, more prosperous, but time and the pendulum of history had reduced it by the 1970s to no more than a cluster of izbas. But for three young men—the handsome young Alyosha, the crippled Utkin, and the older, dashing Samurai—little is needed to construct their own special universe. Despite the harshness of the environment and their meager resources, the three adolescents form a tight band of friendship and dream of another life, a world of passion and love. And when they learn one day that a Western film is being shown in the c...
Le Testament Français
On the edge of the Siberian steppes, a young boy grows up listening to his French grandmother's stories of France just before the Great War - a nostalgic portrait of a vanished world, but a bewitching one during the Soviet regime. Gradually the story emerges of his grandmother's subsequent life in Russia, through the horrors of the revolution and World War II. Torn between two cultures, he eventually leaves after the fall of the Berlin Wall for Paris, and discovers how far his imagination led him from reality. But he stays, until a letter arrives containing an astonishing revelation.
