Sashenka
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- 75,00 kr
Publisher Description
Discover the epic story of revolution, passion, and betrayal from international bestselling author and historian, Simon Sebag Montefiore - Book 1 in The Mosow Trilogy!
*RECOMMENDED BY THE QUEEN'S READING ROOM BOOK CLUB*
'Intricate, fast moving... by the time I put the book down, long after midnight, I was in tears' ? The Times
Winter, 1916.
In St Petersburg, snow is falling in a country on the brink of revolution.
Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her role in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.
Twenty years on, Sashenka has a powerful husband and two children. Around her people are disappearing but her own family is safe.But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair which will have devastating consequences.
Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heart-breaking story of passion and betrayal, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism - and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice ...
Readers LOVE Simon Sebag Montefiore:
'Agile plotting and vivid characterisation [...] combine to make Sashenka an addictive page-turner with an elegant, steely edge of verisimilitude' - Sunday Telegraph
'Full of fascinating, meticulously researched detail about Russian life' - Daisy Buchanan
'To write a good historical novel you have to recreate that world, both physically and intellectually - and there must be a sense that history is driving the plot forwards. Montefiore succeeds on all counts' - Evening Standard
'Passionate, complex, incisive, salutary and utterly bloody upsetting. One of those classic books that people will want to read again - I certainly will - when I recover from it - and enthuse others to read' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'Simon Sebag Montefiore has a terrific talent for creating tension' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'What an excellent writer, what a brilliant story teller, what an epic journey he took me on with amazing characters and such attention to detail' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'A tour de force of a book' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'A true page-turner and yet so much more. Rich in both historical detail and family drama, Sashenka will stay with me for a long time' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
'A superb story fabulously told' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lauded historian Montefiore (Young Stalin) ventures successfully into fiction with the epic story of Sashenka Zeitlin, a privileged Russian Jew caught up in the romance of the Russian revolution and then destroyed by the Stalinist secret police. The novel's first section, set in 1916, describes how, under the tutelage of her Bolshevik uncle, Sashenka becomes a na ve, idealistic revolutionary charmed by her role as a courier for the underground and rejecting her own bourgeois background. Skip forward to 1939, when Sashenka and her party apparatchik husband are at the zenith of success until Sashenka's affair with a disgraced writer leads to arrests and accusations; in vivid scenes of psychological and physical torture, Sashenka is forced to choose between her family, her lover and her cause. But as this section ends, many questions remain, and it is up to historian Katinka Vinsky in 1994 to find the answers to what really happened to Sashenka and her family. Montefiore's prose is unexciting, but the tale is thick and complex, and the characters' lives take on a palpable urgency against a wonderfully realized backdrop. Readers with an interest in Russian history will particularly delight in Sashenka's story.
