Andreï Makine

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...

In this remarkable novel, which spans eighty years of the twentieth century, Andreï Makine describes, beautifully but unsparingly, the almost uninterrupted succession of violence, misery, and horror that has been visited on the Russian people since the October Revolution of 1917. For those quick to forget, or too young to remember, he paints a graphic portrait of those years in a three-generational novel that is as moving as it is revealing. A young...

"Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber enlisted in the French army at the outset of World War II and quickly rose to the rank of lieutenant. Despite his patriotism and courage in defending his country, in which he narrowly escaped death several times, he suffered the bigotry of his fellow soldiers until he was expelled from the army for being Jewish. He sought exile in Spain and was deported and interned in a concentration camp before he managed to join the...

With this novel, Andreï Makine, whose work has been compared to that of Balzac, Chekhov, Pasternak, and Proust, brings to a stunning conclusion his epic trilogy that began with Dreams of My Russian Summers and continued with Requiem for a Lost Empire. The novel opens in 1942, in a burning, gutted Stalingrad, where the German and Russian armies are locked in a struggle to the death. Amid these ruins, a French pilot and a nurse, also French, are engaged...

"Siberia, early seventies. The narrator, a thirteen-year-old orphan, saves Vardan, a young Armenian boy, from discrimination and being attacked by fellow Soviet students in their schoolyard. A friendship is born. When Vardan brings him home, the narrator enters a world of Armenian families living in the periphery of a prison where their husbands, sons, and fathers are detained. It is there, in the warmth of their home, that the narrator meets courage,...

An orphan reflects on the unbreakable bond between love and freedom in the Soviet Union. In Soviet Russia the desire for freedom is also a desire for the freedom to love. Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance. Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him: a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another;...

"Ce roman d'une amitié de jeunesse révèle un épisode crucial de la vie d'Andreï Makine. Le narrateur, qui vit dans un orphelinat de Sibérie, devient le garde du corps d'un garçon de son âge, Vardan, persécuté par les autres en raison de sa pureté et de sa santé fragile. En suivant ces deux adolescents, nous arrivons chez Vardan dans un quartier déshérité, le Bout du diable, où réside une petite communauté d'Arméniens venus soutenir...