Dreams of My Russian Summers

Dreams of My Russian Summers
Author: Andreï Makine
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-05-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1628721162

Every summer, young Andrei visits his grandmother, Charlotte Lemmonier, whom he loves dearly. In a dusty village overlooking the vast Russian steppes, she captivates her grandson and the other children of the village with wondrous tales—watching Proust play tennis in Neuilly, Tsar Nicholas II’s visit to Paris, French president Felix Faure dying in the arms of his mistress. But from his mysterious grandmother, Andrei also learns of a Russia he has never known: a country of famine and misery, brutal injustice, and the hopeless chaos of war. Enthralled, he weaves her stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. She creates for him a vivid portrait of the France of her childhood, a distant Atlantis far more elegant, carefree, and stimulating than Russia in the 1970s and ‘80s. Her warm, artful memories of her homeland and of books captivate Andrei. Absorbed in this vision, he becomes an outsider in his own country, and eventually a restless traveler around Europe. Dreams of My Russian Summers is an epic full of passion and tenderness, pain and heartbreak, mesmerizing in every way.

DREAMS OF MY RUSSIAN SUMMERS--INT'L EDITION

DREAMS OF MY RUSSIAN SUMMERS--INT'L EDITION
Author: Andrei Makine
Publisher: Touchstone
Total Pages: 256
Release: 1998-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780684856506

Dreams of My Russian Summers tells the poignant story of a boy growing up amid the harsh realities of Soviet life in the 1960s and '70s, and of his extraordinary love for an elegant Frenchwoman, Charlotte Lemonnier, who is his grandmother. Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here, during the warm evenings, they sit on Charlotte's narrow, flower-covered bacony and listen to tales from another time, another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly captivates the children with stories of Tsar Nicholas's visit to Paris in 1896, of the great Paris flood of 1910, of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress. But from Charlotte the boy also learns of a Russia he has never known, of famine and misery, of brutal injustice, of the hopeless chaos of war. He follows her as she travels by foot from Moscow half the way to Siberia; suffers with her as she tells of her husband - his grandfather - a victim of Stalin's purges; shudders as she describes her own capture by bandits, who brutalize her and left her for dead. Could all this pain and suffering really have happened to his gentle, beloved Charlotte? Mesmerized, the boy weaves Charlotte's stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. Yet, despite all the deprivations and injustices of the Soviet world, he like many Russians still feels a strong affinity with and "an indestructible love" for his homeland.

Dreams of My Russian Summer

Dreams of My Russian Summer
Author: Andreï Makine
Publisher: Everbind
Total Pages:
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780784815618

Andrei, a 1960s Soviet schoolboy, recalls his summer visits with his grandmother, Charlotte, in a remote Siberian village, her magical tales of another time and world.

Dreams of My Russian Summers

Dreams of My Russian Summers
Author: Andrei Makine
Publisher: Turtleback Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 1998-08-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781417637546

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

Dreams of the Dying (Enderal, Book 1)

Dreams of the Dying (Enderal, Book 1)
Author: Nicolas Lietzau
Publisher:
Total Pages: 826
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre:
ISBN: 9783982216737

In a tropical island empire where wealth defines worth, a troubled mercenary and a dying magnate's nightmares hold the keys to preventing a catastrophe.

Music of a Life

Music of a Life
Author: Andreï Makine
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Total Pages: 75
Release: 2011-10-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 162872210X

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, 1941. Two days before the concert, on his way home from his final rehearsal, he sees his parents being arrested, taken from their Moscow apartment. Knowing his own arrest will not be far behind, Alexeï flees to the country house of his fiancée, where again betrayal awaits him. He flees, one step ahead of the dreaded secret police until, taking on the identity of a dead soldier, he enlists in the Soviet army. Thus begins his seemingly endless journey, through war and peace, until he lands, two decades later, in a snowbound train station in the Urals, where he relates his harrowing saga to the novel’s narrator. An international bestseller, Music of a Life is, in the words of Le Monde, “extremely powerful . . . a gem.”

Dreams of El Dorado

Dreams of El Dorado
Author: H. W. Brands
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2019-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1541672534

"Epic in its scale, fearless in its scope" (Hampton Sides), this masterfully told account of the American West from a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist sets a new standard as it sweeps from the California Gold Rush and beyond. In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. He shows how the migrants' dreams drove them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame-and how those same dreams also drove them to outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples and one another. The West was where riches would reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the railroad man's enterprise; but El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the East. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.

Our Country Friends

Our Country Friends
Author: Gary Shteyngart
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1984855131

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Financial Times, The Washington Post, Time, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Town & Country, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews “A perfect novel for these times and all times, the single textual artifact from the pandemic era I would place in a time capsule as a representation of all that is good and true and beautiful about literature.”—Molly Young, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) Eight friends, one country house, and six months in isolation—a novel about love, friendship, family, and betrayal hailed as a “virtuoso performance” (USA Today) and “an homage to Chekhov with four romances and a finale that will break your heart” (The Washington Post) In the rolling hills of upstate New York, a group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family. Both elegiac and very, very funny, Our Country Friends is the most ambitious book yet by the author of the beloved bestseller Super Sad True Love Story.

Requiem for a Lost Empire

Requiem for a Lost Empire
Author: Andrei Makine
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2003-04-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 074345362X

Makine's most ambitious and uncompromising work, "Requiem for a Lost Empire" is a three-generation epic unfolding across 80 years of Russian history, from Czarist times to the fall of Communism. Sweeping readers into a Graham Greene-style thriller that opens up like a sinister Russian doll, this novel rivals the depth and ingenuity of Nabokov and the sweep of Tolstoy.