Iron Curtain: A Love Story
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
One of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2023
East and West collide in a “timely” and “bittersweet tale of loyalty, love, and the siren call of freedom” (Rebecca Abrams, Financial Times).
Milena Urbanska is a red princess living in a Soviet satellite state in the 1980s. She enjoys limitless luxury and limited freedom; the end of the Cold War seems unimaginable. When she meets Jason, a confident but politically naïve British poet, they fall into bed together. Before long, Milena is planning her escape. She follows Jason to London, where she’s shocked to find herself living in bohemian poverty. The rented apartment is dingy, the food disgusting, and Jason’s family withholding, but at least there are no hidden cameras recording her every move. As she adjusts to her new life, however, Milena discovers the dark side of Jason’s idea of freedom.
With cool wit and tender precision, Vesna Goldsworthy delivers a razor-sharp vision of two worlds on the brink of change, amidst the failures of family and state. Iron Curtain is a sly, elegant comedy of manners that challenges the myths we tell ourselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Goldsworthy (Chernobyl Strawberries) offers a witty and perceptive novel of love in the twilight of the Soviet Union. The year is 1984, and Milena Urbanska, the pampered daughter of a highly placed party official living in an unnamed Communist satellite country, is used to the finer things in life but chafes under the state scrutiny that goes along with it. Working as an English translator, she meets Jason Connor, a young British poet, whom she promptly sleeps with. After Jason returns to England, Milena books a trip to Cuba with a stopover in London, where she reunites with Jason and informs her parents she has no intention of returning home. Jason lives in a squalid flat in Bloomsbury, a marked change from the luxury Milena is used to. But before anyone can say "glasnost," Milena is married to Jason and the mother of twin boys. Spied on by the Russians and saddled with eccentric in-laws (Jason's mother looks like "the bohemian mistress of some double-initialed writer from the past"), Milena finds the grass less green than she expected. Goldsworthy's perceptive and well-crafted story plays like The Americans as revised by Sally Rooney, with acidic observations worthy of the late Kingsley Amis. By flipping the Cold War script, Goldsworthy comes up with a winner.
