Andreï Makine

Locked behind the Iron Curtain, a young boy grows up bewitched by his French grandmother's memories of Paris before the Great War. Yet, despite what he also learns of her suffering in the Soviet Union under Stalin and during the Second World War, as an adolescent, he finds himself proud to be a Russian. Torn between the two cultures, he...

Alexei Berg's father is a well-known dramatist and his mother an opera singer, but in late 1930s Russia both parents suffer constant suspicion and harassment under Stalin's reign of terror. So great is Alexei's musical talent that he is allowed to continue his studies, but two days before his first concert in May 1941, he arrives home to find his...