Overview
This stunning debut novel by the author of the subsequent international best-sellers Dreams of My Russian Summers and Music of a Life provides a searing look inside the Soviet Union from World War II to the tumultuous early 1990s.For his extraordinary bravery beyond the call of duty at the battle of Stalingrad, Ivan Dimitrovich Davidov is awarded his country's highest military honor: Hero of the Soviet Union. Married after World War II to Tatiana, the nurse who miraculously found him amid a pile of corpses after an apocalyptic battle late in the war, they have a daughter, Olia, who grows up in the glow of her father's reputation. As an interpreter at the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, then the 17-year-old Olia commits an indiscretion that leads her straight into the arms of the KGB. As the years roll by, Olia, more and more implicated in espionage, despairs of her fate as "political prostitute," while her father, equally used by the state, becomes increasingly disillusioned and unruly. Finally, the lives of the father and daughter intersect in an understated and utterly moving conclusion.