Dreams of My Russian Summers

An Arcade Publishing First North American Edition hardcover in fine condition. Boards are clean, bright, and square throughout with absolutely no wear to the spine, corners, or edges. Dust jacket is bright, crisp, and undamaged, fine in all respects with no tears, chips, fading, or soiling. Pages are fresh and clean throughout, completely free of any marks, stamps, or annotations. Binding is firm and tight. A pristine, essentially unread copy in fine condition throughout. Published by Arcade Publishing, New York, in 1997, and distributed by Little, Brown and Company, this First North American Edition presents Dreams of My Russian Summers — the English translation by Geoffrey Strachan of Andreï Makine's Le testament français, first published in France by Mercure de France in 1995. The novel became the first in history to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis simultaneously, as well as the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens — three of France's foremost literary prizes, a feat without precedent in French literary history. It was also a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. The story of Makine himself is as remarkable as the novel: born in Siberia in 1957 and raised partly through his French-born grandmother's language and memories, he fled the Soviet Union for France in 1987, sleeping rough while trying to establish himself as a writer. French publishers, unable to believe that a Russian exile could write such elegant French prose, refused his manuscripts until he agreed to present them as translations from the Russian. He eventually won French citizenship personally from President Jacques Chirac. The novel is drawn from that double life: narrated by a young boy named Alyosha, who spends his childhood summers with his French grandmother Charlotte on the edge of the Siberian steppes. Dreams of My Russian Summers is one of those rare novels that earns its prizes not through ambition but through witness. Makine writes of his childhood summers on the Siberian steppes with his extraordinary French grandmother Charlotte — her language, her memories of France, the world she carried inside her — against a landscape of vast beauty and quiet terror. Stalin's atrocities move through the novel like a shadow that the child narrator cannot yet fully name. It is a book that rewards the reader who stays with it to the very last page. Readers who love Doctor Zhivago will find here a kindred spirit. Highly recommended. Ships within Canada. International orders welcome through AbeBooks.