Geoffrey Strachan

Andreï Makine

A boy growing up in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s visits his French grandmother each summer, accumulating new tales of a Russia he never knew

A Novel

Dreams Of My Russian Summers

In a snowbound railway station deep in the Soviet Union, a stranded passenger comes across an old man playing the piano in the dark, silent tears rolling down his cheeks. Once on the train to Moscow he begins to tell his story: a tale of loss, love and survival that movingly illustrates the strength of human resilience. 'A novella to be read in a lunch hour and remembered for ever' Jilly Cooper, Books of the Year, Sunday Telegraph

A Life's Music

A deeply moving meditation on memory, history, love, and art by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers In The Life of an Unknown Man, Andreï Makine explores what truly matters in life through the prism of Russia's past and present. Shutov, a disenchanted writer, revisits St. Petersburg after twenty years of exile in Paris, hoping to recapture his youth. Instead, he meets Volsky, an old man who tells him his extraordinary story: of surviving the siege of Leningrad, the march on Berlin, and Stalin's purges, and of a transcendent love affair. Volsky's life is an inspiration to Shutov -- because for all that he suffered, he knew great happiness. This depth of feeling stands in sharp contrast to the empty lives Shutov encounters in the new Russia, and to his own life, that of just another unknown man . . .

The Life of an Unknown Man

Haunted by a dark childhood, a former war orphan and Russian exile in France searches for information about his heritage, which may be linked to French fighter pilot Jacques Dorme, an escaped POW who fell in love with a nurse in Stalingrad and lost his life in a heroic act of sacrifice. Reprint.

The Earth And Sky of Jacques Dorme

"In the spring of 1945, as World War II is winding down, nineteen-year-old Boris Koptek leaves the remote village of Mirnoe to join the Russian army as it closes in on the beleaguered German capital. He leaves behind the sixteen-year-old love of his life, Vera, vowing to her that as soon as he returns, they will marry. Young Boris and his engineering battalion fight their way to the very outskirts of Berlin, where literally days before war's end, he is reported killed in action crossing the Spree River. Vera steadfastly refuses to believe he is dead, and month after month, year after years, faithfully awaits his return. At first the village applauds her exemplary love, but as time goes on, they question her misplaced fidelity, and even her sanity." "Now, thirty years later, a twenty-six-year-old researcher arrives in Mirnoe from Leningrad to document the customs and legends of the village. But more and more of his notebook fills with observations, reflections, and theories about Vera, with whom, despite the difference in their ages, he soon falls hopelessly in love. The simple problem, however, is: How can he compete with a ghost that refuses to die?"--BOOK JACKET.

The Woman who Waited

Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer

Did sex bring down the Iron Curtain? An orphan reflects on the unbreakable bond between love and freedom in the Soviet Union.

Brief Loves that Live Forever

Ranging from the time of the czar to the fall of Communism, this multigenerational saga follows the lives and fortunes of one Russian family over the course of eighty turbulent years.

Requiem for a Lost Empire

The crime of Olga Arbyelina

Le Testament Francais

Requiem for the East

"In 1980 the beautiful Olya, now seventeen, assigned as an interpreter during the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, commits an indiscretion with a French athlete that throws her straight into the waiting arms of the KGB. As the years roll by, Olya, more and more deeply implicated in espionage, despairs of her fate as a "political prostitute," while her father, equally used by the State, becomes increasingly disillusioned and unruly, until he is arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct. Finally, the lives of father and daughter intersect in an utterly moving and heartrending conclusion."

A Hero's Daughter

Human Love

Addressing himself to his childhood friend Arkadi from exile in Paris, Alyosha recreates their happy years in a village commune outside Leningrad in the 60s, when the sky was always blue and each summer they marched with drum and trumpet at communist youth camp, their eyes set on the glorious future promised by the propaganda machine - until they learnt the full horror of what their parents had suffered during the war and under Stalin, and began to see through the lies.

Confessions of a Lapsed Standard-bearer

The life of an unknown man

A woman loved

Seuil

L'archipel d'une autre vie

Once Upon The River of Love

Hero's Daughter

A son drugs his mother so he can have sex with her. The woman, an exiled Russian princess in 1940s France, plays along, pretending to be unconscious, because the boy is a hemophiliac and will die soon. By the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers.

Andreï Makine

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