''A mini-masterpiece''William Boyd, Guardian

''Achingly beautiful'' Guardian ''By turns touching and profoundly sad'' SpectatorWhen a young, rebellious writer from Leningrad arrives in a remote Russian village to study local customs, one woman stands out: Vera, who has been waiting thirty years for her lover to return from the Second World War. As fascinated as he is appalled by the fruitless fidelity of this still beautiful woman, he sets out to win her affections. But the better he thinks he understands her the more she surprises him, and the more he gains uncomfortable insights into himself. Lyrically evoking the haunting beauty of the Archangel region, Makine tells a timeless story of the human heart and its capacity for enduring love, selfish passion and cowardly betrayal.

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; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover. As the dreary Brezhnev era gives way to Perestroika and the fall of Communism, the orphan uncovers the truth behind the life of Dmitri Ress, whose tragic fate embodies the unbreakable bond between love and freedom.

''It is impossible to exaggerate the power of this short, unbearably poignant novel.'' Mail on Sunday''A bold and elegant novel'' Helen Dunmore, Guardian''A haunting story, beautifully told'' Viv Groskop, ObserverAn extraordinary story of love and endurance during the Siege of Leningrad lies at the heart of a magnificent novel about Russia past and present, and the human condition.One night in St Petersburg, two men meet, both adrift in the brash new Russia: Shutov, a writer visiting after years of exile in Paris, and Volsky, an elderly survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and Stalin''s purges. His life story - one of extreme suffering, courage and an extraordinary love - he considers unremarkable. To Shutov it is a revelation, the tale of an unsung hero that puts everything into perspective and suggests where true happiness lies.

Locked behind the Iron Curtain, a young boy grows up bewitched by his French grandmother’s memories of Paris before the Great War. On her balcony overlooking the Siberian steppes, Charlotte Lemonnier fires her grandson’s imagination with tales of the great flood in 1910, of Proust playing tennis in Neuilly and the President dying in the arms of his mistress, of avenues lined with chestnut trees and elegant cafes.Charlotte’s vision of a paradise lost, though, is overlaid by her subsequent experience. As her grandson grows older, he learns how this remarkable woman survived the Russian revolution’s aftermath, Stalin’s purges and the horrors of the Second World War, gaining from her a portrait of the country drawn with an outsider’s eye. Yet for all the monstrosities of his native land, he realises he is proud to be Russian. Torn between two cultures, as an adolescent he turns his back on all things French. Then in his twenties he abandons the Soviet Union and eventually reaches Paris – where a startling revelation awaits him.This luminous, haunting novel traces a sentimental and intellectual journey that embraces the dramatic history of this century.

''A mini-masterpiece''William Boyd, Guardian

''Achingly beautiful'' Guardian ''By turns touching and profoundly sad'' SpectatorWhen a young, rebellious writer from Leningrad arrives in a remote Russian village to study local customs, one woman stands out: Vera, who has been waiting thirty years for her lover to return from the Second World War. As fascinated as he is appalled by the fruitless fidelity of this still beautiful woman, he sets out to win her affections. But the better he thinks he understands her the more she surprises him, and the more he gains uncomfortable insights into himself. Lyrically evoking the haunting beauty of the Archangel region, Makine tells a timeless story of the human heart and its capacity for enduring love, selfish passion and cowardly betrayal.

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; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover. As the dreary Brezhnev era gives way to Perestroika and the fall of Communism, the orphan uncovers the truth behind the life of Dmitri Ress, whose tragic fate embodies the unbreakable bond between love and freedom.

''It is impossible to exaggerate the power of this short, unbearably poignant novel.'' Mail on Sunday''A bold and elegant novel'' Helen Dunmore, Guardian''A haunting story, beautifully told'' Viv Groskop, ObserverAn extraordinary story of love and endurance during the Siege of Leningrad lies at the heart of a magnificent novel about Russia past and present, and the human condition.One night in St Petersburg, two men meet, both adrift in the brash new Russia: Shutov, a writer visiting after years of exile in Paris, and Volsky, an elderly survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and Stalin''s purges. His life story - one of extreme suffering, courage and an extraordinary love - he considers unremarkable. To Shutov it is a revelation, the tale of an unsung hero that puts everything into perspective and suggests where true happiness lies.

Locked behind the Iron Curtain, a young boy grows up bewitched by his French grandmother’s memories of Paris before the Great War. On her balcony overlooking the Siberian steppes, Charlotte Lemonnier fires her grandson’s imagination with tales of the great flood in 1910, of Proust playing tennis in Neuilly and the President dying in the arms of his mistress, of avenues lined with chestnut trees and elegant cafes.Charlotte’s vision of a paradise lost, though, is overlaid by her subsequent experience. As her grandson grows older, he learns how this remarkable woman survived the Russian revolution’s aftermath, Stalin’s purges and the horrors of the Second World War, gaining from her a portrait of the country drawn with an outsider’s eye. Yet for all the monstrosities of his native land, he realises he is proud to be Russian. Torn between two cultures, as an adolescent he turns his back on all things French. Then in his twenties he abandons the Soviet Union and eventually reaches Paris – where a startling revelation awaits him.This luminous, haunting novel traces a sentimental and intellectual journey that embraces the dramatic history of this century.