Snowdrops
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3.7 • 11 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and the CWA Gold Dagger 2011
Nick Platt is a British lawyer working in early-2000s Moscow, a city of hedonism and desperation where secrets, and corpses, come to light when the snows thaw. Nick doesn’t ask too many questions about the shady deals he works on—he’s too busy enjoying the surreally sinful nightlife Moscow has to offer.
Riding the subway on a balmy September day, he rescues two willowy sisters, Masha and Katya, from a would-be purse snatcher. Soon Nick begins to feel something for Masha that he is pleased to think is love. Then the sisters introduce him to their aged aunt, Tatiana, the owner of a valuable apartment. Before summer arrives, Nick will make disturbing discoveries about his job, his lover and, most of all, himself.
Snowdrops is a riveting story of love and moral freefall. Taut and intense, it has a momentum as irresistible to the reader as the moral danger that first enchants, then threatens to overwhelm, its narrator. In Moscow, as Nick’s friend Steve warns him, “there are no love stories. There are no business stories. There are only crime stories.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Things may not be what they appear, but they turn out to be exactly what readers will predict in this saggy debut about shady business deals in go-go capitalist Russia. Nick Platt, a lawyer who has traded his dull British life for pushing paper in Moscow, soon takes up with a leggy young Russian about whom he knows nothing and, at her behest, helps a babushka trade her fabulous apartment for a half-built place in the country. The deal seems like a scam, and, of course, it is, but Nick is blinded by lust and nearly always a step behind the reader. He blithely gets involved in a multimillion-dollar loan for an oil pipeline brokered by a dodgy fellow known only as "the Cossack," even after a key player goes missing. Most readers will not be so easily duped, and Nick's oft-repeated I-should-have seen-it-comings undercut any suspense that might remain, though there are interesting bits to be found in the travelogue-style writing about the new Russia.
Customer Reviews
A fascinating read.
Glad to have read this book, but wonder about the veracity of the life in Moscow depicted. How authentic is that? Has the author any real experience?