Synopses & Reviews
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 taleswatching Proust play tennis in Neuilly, Tsar Nicholas IIs 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.
Synopsis
Andrew Makine's luminous and haunting novel--a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.
About the Author
Andreï Makine was born in Russia in 1957 and emigrated to France in 1987. In 1995 his novel Dreams of My Russian Summers won the Goncourt Prize and the Médicis Prize, France’s two most prestigious literary awards.Geoffey Strachan has translated works from French and German in a wide variety of fields, including all the novels of Andreï Makine. He has been awarded both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Schlegel-Treck Prize.