Geoffrey Strachan

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...

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...

A powerful examination of the artistic impulse, cultural identity, and family bonds Anita is waiting for Adam to be released from prison. They met twenty years ago at a New Year's Eve party in Paris, a city where they both felt out of place--he as a recent arrival from the provinces, and she as an immigrant from the island of Mauritius. They quickly fell in love, married, and moved to a village in southwestern France, to live on the shores of the...

An orphan reflects on the unbreakable bond between love and freedom in the Soviet Union.

"One night, seventeen-year-old Wolf steals his mother's car and drives six hundred kilometers in search of his sister, who left home ten years ago. Unlicensed and on edge, he veers onto the wrong side of the road and causes an accident. He is arrested and incarcerated, forcing his mother and sister to reconnect and pick up the pieces in order to fight for his release."--

Young filmmaker Oleg Erdmann spends years writing a screenplay about the enigmatic Catherine the Great only to fail to capture the true essence of her. As the Soviet Union changes before him, new opportunities arise for him to bring her to life.