My Russian Love

"My Russian Love opens in the present as Luca, a successful 40-year-old screenwriter, is returning to Paris from newly renamed St. Petersburg, where he intends to shoot a film based on a short story by Pushkin. In the dining car of the train, five tables in front of him and across the aisle, he sees a woman make an unusual gesture, tossing her hair back and putting her palm to the back of her neck in pain. The gesture shocks him, awakening a twenty-year-old memory he had thought buried forever. Before he can react, the girl rises from the table and disappears. The memory is of a girl named Anna, the great love of Luca's youth, and the rest of the novel is a braid woven of two strands: how Luca and Anna met, fell in love, and were separated; and Luca's increasingly desperate effort to find the girl he glimpsed on the train. What follows, in flashback, is a recounting, in passionately intimate detail, of Luca and Anna's affair. Despite its simplicity of style, "My Russian Love is a complex, seamless love story spanning a generation, and effortlessly switching locales between St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York. The ending is an explosive secret few readers will guess in advance, and it is shattering. Soaked in art, poetry, music, and film, "My Russian Love packs an emotional wallop."