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The Free World
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
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Editorial reviews
This is a book about trying the impossible: outdistancing the pull of history while remaining in stasis. It begins with a family of Russian-Latvian-Jewish refugees gathering their bags in Vienna, on a railway platform, that perfect symbol of purgatory and anticipation. It ends somewhere on the way to Canada, though we don’t know for certain whether or not the Kraznanskys, who we have come to care about so much in the intervening chapters, actually succeed in arriving at their destination. And that’s how it should be: emigration to the new world is a talisman, forever out of reach; the family’s abandoned life in Riga, on the other hand, is seen only in flashbacks, befitting the disjointed chronology of the stateless immigrant. Their current location is early-70s Rome, and, in his first novel, David Bezmozgis has painted an unforgettable picture of the city from the immigrant perspective: the noises and fashions of the time are pungent, and mix with a general sense of fatality. People here are caught up in history like debris in a great whirling river, going nowhere and resigned to the fact that “this is the nature of our times”.
This world-weary disposition is distilled in Stefan Rudnicki’s charcoal-smoked voice, a voice marinated in Russian Jewish humor, querulous and lively, though he slows down beautifully to fit the gravitas of memories. In a book with not much in the way of a conventional plot, his narration is hugely important in giving weight to the incidental details that coalesce around the family and create smaller stories woven around the simple narrative, and which might put the listener in mind of Gary Shteyngart and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The weak link is the performance of Emma the matriarch, given a uniformly soft compassion that tends to negate her impact, though blame for this must be shared by the author who has created a reactive character with not much interior life of her own. However, Rudnicki clearly respects Emma’s distress at the splintering of her family: relationships are the first casualty of new-found if undefined freedom, and couples pushed together by outside forces fall apart in the manner of old regimes and political systems. “They remained together just long enough to get to the free world, whose freedom they defined in no small part to freedom from each other.” What matters here is personal integrity in the face of overwhelming uncertainty. As Alec reflects, “How you managed to remain upright became your style, who you were. Style was the difference between him and Polina.” Alec and Polina rent a room from Lyvova, a Kiev-born tour guide with a past as compromised as any other characters. Passing through the lives of the Kraznanskys, he provides the real heart of this chaotic and charming book, and provides the book’s killer line: intent on escaping the past, but rejecting the different utopias offered to him by Soviet Russia and Israel, he says, “I want to go to the place with the least number of parades.” A fitting epitaph for a refugee from the 20th century. —Dafydd Phillips
Publisher's summary
Summer 1978. Brezhnev sits like a stone in the Kremlin, Israel and Egypt are inching towards peace, and in the bustling, polyglot streets of Rome, strange new creatures have appeared: Soviet Jews who have escaped to freedom through a crack in the Iron Curtain.
Among the thousands who have landed in Italy to secure visas for new lives in the West are the members of the Krasnansky family - three generations of Russian Jews. There is Samuil, an old Communist and Red Army veteran, who reluctantly leaves the country to which he has dedicated himself body and soul; Karl, his elder son, a man eager to embrace the opportunities emigration affords; Alec, his younger son, a carefree playboy for whom life has always been a game; and Polina, Alec's new wife, who has risked the most by breaking with her old family to join this new one.
Together, they will spend six months in Rome - their way station and purgatory. They will immerse themselves in the carnival of emigration, in an Italy rife with love affairs and ruthless hustles, with dislocation and nostalgia, with the promise and peril of a better life.
Through the unforgettable Krasnansky family, David Bezmozgis has created an intimate portrait of a tumultuous era. Written in precise, musical prose, The Free World is a stunning debut novel, a heartfelt multigenerational saga of great historical scope and even greater human debth. Enlarging on the themes of aspiration and exile that infused his critically acclaimed first collection, Natasha and Other Stories, The Free World establishes Bezmozgis as one of our most mature and accomplished storytellers.
Critic reviews
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
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Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
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The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Ethiopian émigré Dinaw Mengestu is a skilled observer of people who offers a colorful debut work of fiction. Insightful and swiftly paced, this novel evokes past and present in the course of its compelling narrative. It's the `70s, and one D.C. neighborhood is undergoing big changes. In the mix is Ethiopian grocery owner Sepha Stephanos - a man with a complex past who fled his homeland after seeing his father brutalized by themilitary. He hopes for new prospects in D.C.'s gentrification process.
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Great book, wonderful reader
- By Lisbeth on 11-22-11
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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Mosaic
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.
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Absolutely excellent!
- By Roberta on 09-22-11
By: Diane Armstrong
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Golden Earrings
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Catalina, grand-daughter of Spanish refugees, is a disciplined student with the School of the Paris Opera Ballet. Little gets inthe way of her career until the visit of an otherworldly being, who leaves her a mysterious pair of golden earrings. Given a quest, Catalina realises she must explore her own Spanish heritage and makes the connection between the visitor and ‘La Rusa’, a young Andalusian flamenco star. La Rusa died in exile in Paris in 1952, her death ruled as suicide. But as Catalina begins to discover, there were those in the community, who had good reason for wanting La Rusa dead.
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Fabulous story
- By Paddington on 10-19-12
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Eichmann in My Hands
- A First-Person Account by the Israeli Agent Who Captured Hitler's Chief Executioner
- By: Peter Z. Malkin, Harry Stein
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1960 Argentina, a covert team of Israeli agents hunted down the most elusive war criminal alive: Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust. The young spy who tackled Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street - and fought every compulsion to strangle the Obersturmführer then and there - was Peter Z. Malkin. For decades Malkin's identity as Eichmann's captor was kept secret. Here he reveals the entire breathtaking story - from the genesis of the top-secret surveillance operation to the dramatic public capture and smuggling of Eichmann to Israel to stand trial.
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Excellent the first person account
- By Barrett Francescatti on 02-09-22
By: Peter Z. Malkin, and others
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Millard Salter's Last Day
- By: Jacob M. Appel
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In an effort to delay the frailty and isolation that comes with old age, psychiatrist Millard Salter decides to kill himself by the end of the day - but first he has to tie up some loose ends. These include a tête-à-tête with his youngest son, Lysander, who at 43 has yet to hold down a paying job; an unscheduled rendezvous with his first wife, Carol, whom he hasn't seen in 27 years; and a brief visit to the grave of his second wife, Isabelle. Complicating this plan, though, is Delilah, the widow with whom he has fallen in love in the past few months.
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great storytelling....
- By Anna Marie Bair on 01-18-20
By: Jacob M. Appel
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Sunny's Nights
- Lost and Found at the Bar at the End of the World
- By: Tim Sultan
- Narrated by: Robert Malloch
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine that Alice had walked into a bar instead of falling down the rabbit hole. In the tradition of J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar and the classic reportage of Joseph Mitchell, here is an indelible portrait of what is quite possibly the greatest bar in the world—and the mercurial, magnificent man behind it. The first time he saw Sunny’s Bar, in 1995, Tim Sultan was lost, thirsty for a drink, and intrigued by the single bar sign among the forlorn warehouses lining the Brooklyn waterfront.
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Visiting an Era
- By Carolyn on 03-01-16
By: Tim Sultan
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The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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All Our Names
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld, Korey Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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All Our Names is the story of a young man who comes of age during an African revolution, drawn from the hushed halls of his university into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, and the path of revolution leads to almost certain destruction, he leaves behind his country and friends for America. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into the routines of small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past....
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A Tale of Two Continents
- By David on 07-31-14
By: Dinaw Mengestu
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After the Roundup
- Escape and Survival in Hitler’s France
- By: Joseph Weismann
- Narrated by: J. Clark Allison
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated. A thousand children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt.
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A “must-listen” book
- By Jonathan R Scupin on 09-25-18
By: Joseph Weismann
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Dancing with the Enemy
- My Family's Holocaust Secret
- By: Paul Glaser
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster, Christa Lewis
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The gripping story of the author's aunt, a Jewish dance instructor who was betrayed to the Nazis by the two men she loved, yet managed to survive WWII by teaching dance lessons to the SS at Auschwitz. Her epic life becomes a window into the author's own past and the key to discovering his Jewish roots.
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Amazing Unique
- By Nordic Artisan on 05-11-19
By: Paul Glaser
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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The Museum of Innocence
- By: Orhan Pamuk, Maureen Freely (translator)
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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Grand Central
- Original Stories of Postwar Love and Reunion
- By: Melanie Benjamin, Amanda Hodgkinson, Pam Jenoff, and others
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, through the whispering gallery, beneath the ceiling of stars, and past the information booth and its beckoning four-faced clock, to whatever destination is calling them. It is a place where people come to say hello and good-bye. And each person has a story to tell.
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Grand Central: Memories
- By ZacharyKindle Customer on 05-03-17
By: Melanie Benjamin, and others
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Marina and Lee
- The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy
- By: Priscilla Johnson McMillan
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray, Joseph Finder
- Length: 24 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina and Lee is one of the best and truest audiobooks about the Kennedy assassination. Priscilla Johnson McMillan came to the story with a unique knowledge of the two main characters. In the 1950s she knew Kennedy well for a time when he was hospitalized with Addison's disease. She talked to him frequently, brought him books, knew his wife, and formed a strong opinion of the sort of man he was. What is astonishing is that she also knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
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Now I know why he did it
- By Rodd on 06-09-14
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A Chance in the World
- An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home
- By: Steve Pemberton
- Narrated by: Steve Pemberton
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A Chance in the World is the unbelievably true story of a wounded and broken boy destined to become a man of resilience, determination, and vision. Through it all, Steve's story teaches us that no matter how broken our past, no matter how great our misfortunes, we have it in us to create a new beginning and to build a place where love awaits.
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Good Book
- By Amazon Customer on 08-19-20
By: Steve Pemberton
What listeners say about The Free World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- alan
- 12-27-11
Insightfullness overcomes crude dialect narration
Would you listen to The Free World again? Why?
It hurts to join characters suffering through the immigration process, but worth it, once, for the insights into modern Soviet Jewish feelings and attitudes.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
This is a story about refugees in the modern world - not in danger, not wanting for food or shelter, but truly lost, and inventorying their values for direction as they try to find their place in the world, literally and metaphorically; here their refugee status a painful externalization of their inner lostness. The narrator counters the universalism of this quest, and the particulars of each character, by having each character speak in the same generic Jewish-Russian lilt, as though this were one long Jewish joke.
Who was the most memorable character of The Free World and why?
The old Communists, immensely sympathetic as they lose faith in a system they worshipped, realize they were dupes thinking themselves skeptics, and wonder how to can go on and be useful in this new world; and the young, trying to find their own place.
Any additional comments?
Bezmozgis is a fine portratist, depicting people in their contexts.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Debora Katz
- 10-10-12
Not what I expected
The story wasn't engaging. I didn't really like the major characters. It was hard to care about them. Although I found some of the minor characters interesting. I also learned about the immigration process.
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- Velmaris R
- 02-06-19
Intriguing story. At times difficult to follow
I believe this story would have been easier to follow in writing than in audio format.
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- David
- 03-23-22
Imperfect and Intriguing Characters
“The Free World” focuses on a family leaving Latvia when it was part of the Soviet Union, seeking a better life in North America. The story takes place as the family settles restlessly near Rome, waiting for the necessary papers to emigrate further. Each of the family members is well-drawn and believable, including Samuel, the patriarch, a decorated World War II veteran who still believes in Communist Russia; Carl, his amoral older son; Eric, the handsome and flirtatious son, and Polina, Eric’s practical Latvian wife. Like all the characters, each is imperfect, each is believable.
The novel meanders, just as the family did in their stay in Italy. There is some petty crime, some romance and a lot of frustration. I enjoyed it all, and I was sorry when the novel ended.
The narrator had a deep voice with a slight Eastern European accent. He did not change his voice when different characters were speaking, but that didn’t bother me. Overall, I found this an unusual and surprising story of refugees, well told.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Janet
- 06-28-11
Excellent Character study -don't expect a plot
This book gives the listener a window into the lives of a family in transition between locales, relationships and cultures. It paints immigration as likely closer to reality than the relief of liberation we usually hear about. I happened to be in the mood for such a piece as I listened to it, but the narrator's deep pitch and unimaginative delivery almost stopped me from finishing. Although one of the points of the tale is that we trade one complex circumstance for another, there was NOTHING resolved for any of the characters at the end nor did the listener feel that anyone had learned anything. One of the most unsatisfying endings ever.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- DIANE
- 05-30-11
Couldn't finish.
I just could not finish this book. I found the narrator's voice intensely annoying and though it seemed as if the story was going to eventually get interesting, I kept avoiding going any further and never finished.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Nick
- 12-21-11
Interesting Idea But Not Interesting
Would you try another book from David Bezmozgis and/or Stefan Rudnicki?
Bezmozgis, no. Rudnicki, of course! I listen to him all the time.
What do you think your next listen will be?
Nonfiction.
What three words best describe Stefan Rudnicki’s performance?
Not his best.
You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?
It is based on a very interesting and unique topic.
Any additional comments?
This book has too many characters, none of whom I cared about. After half an hour I realized I did not know who any of these people were. After a few hours I was still waiting for something to happen. The book would have benefited from having just a few clear main characters. Instead, it was about several people and provided lengthy background stories for just about everyone else.
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Overall
- Lissa Goldman
- 04-11-11
Excellant novel
This is my first experience reading David Bezmogis, but it won't be my last. This was an exceptional novel, extremely well-written, superb narration and fascinating story-line. This book provided insight into the mindset of Russian emigres that I found quite interesting, to say the least.
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8 people found this helpful