Pravda
A Novel
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3.9 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Dark family secrets come to light in this novel of "nearly Dickensian proportions" set in Paris, New York, and St. Petersburg (The New Yorker).
Thirty-two-year-old Gabriel Glover arrives in St. Petersburg from London to find his Russian mother dead in her apartment. Reeling from grief, Gabriel and his twin sister, Isabella, arrange the funeral—without contacting their manipulative and self-indulgent father, who is off living his own decadent life in France.
But unbeknownst to the twins, there is another family member out there. Their mother long ago abandoned a son, Arkady. Now he has grown into a pitiless predator, and is determined to claim his birthright. Aided by an ex-seminarian whose heroin addiction is destroying him, Arkady sets out to find the siblings and reveal the dark secret hidden from them their entire lives.
Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Pravda is a darkly funny and compulsively readable novel about love, loss, and the destructive legacy of deceit from the acclaimed author of Let Go My Hand.
"A novel so vivid it glows in the dark—like truth." —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Docx's second novel (after The Calligrapher) wrings out all the theatrics to be had from unhappy urban-dwelling twins, their sexually voracious father and dead Russian mother. Twins Gabriel and Isabella Glover, both 32 and leading lackluster lives she at a New York PR firm, he the editor in London of Self-Help! magazine see another crack form in their perennially tortured existences when their mother, Maria, who defected to marry their British father, dies alone in St. Petersburg. (Their despised father, Nicholas, meanwhile, dabbles in art, decadence and self-important interior monologues in Paris.) All are unaware of an additional family member: Arkady Artamenkov, their mother's first son, who had been kept afloat by Maria's financial assistance and the guiding hand of his junkie friend, Henry Whey. After the checks stop, Henry hatches a plan to send Arkady to plead for money from the family that doesn't know he exists. Though Docx's prose can get dangerously overheated ("Give me the sincerity of nakedness and the honesty of desire, O God, and deliver me from the turgid bourgeoisie and all their favorite phrases"), the crushing atmosphere will draw in fans of dark Euro-fiction.
