First published 2011
Young Andrei spends each summer in a remote village with his beloved grandmother Charlotte Lemmonier, listening to her tales of a vanished world. She tells him about watching Proust play tennis in Neuilly, witnessing Tsar Nicholas II's Paris visit, and the scandalous death of French president Felix Faure with his mistress. Through these vivid memories, Charlotte paints France as an elegant paradise that stands in sharp contrast to the harsh realities she also shares about Russia's famines, injustices, and wartime chaos. Andrei weaves these stories into his private world of imagination, becoming enchanted by this distant homeland he has never seen. As he absorbs Charlotte's warm recollections of French culture and literature, he grows alienated from 1970s and 1980s Soviet life around him. Her tales transform him into an outsider in his own country, eventually driving him to wander restlessly across Europe in search of the France she described.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, biographical-fiction, russian-literature, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: France, Neuilly, Russia, Soviet Union
Period: 1970s, 1980s, 20th Century, World War I
256 pages · Paperback · Arcade