The next review will be Daphne Kalotay’s Russian Winter, an advanced reader’s copy I had autographed at BEA this year. I am only on pg. 16 at the moment, but if my first impression is correct, this will be an absorbing book indeed.

From the flap: “When she decides to auction her remarkable jewellery collection, Nina Revskaya, once a great star of the Bolshoi Ballet, believes she has drawn a curtain over her past. Instead, the former ballerina finds herself overwhelmed by memories of her homeland and of the events–both glorious and heartbreaking–that changed the course of her life half a century before.

It was in Russia that she discovered the magic of the theater; that she fell in love with the poet Viktor Elsin; that she and her dearest companions–Gersh, a dangerously irreverent composer, and the exquisite Vera, her closest friend–became victims of Stalinist aggression; that a terrible discovery led to a deadly act of betrayal–and to an ingenious escape that eventually brought her to the city of Boston…”

Harper Collins, to be published September 2o1o