Andreï Makine

"Siberia, early seventies. The narrator, a thirteen-year-old orphan, saves Vardan, a young Armenian boy, from discrimination and being attacked by fellow Soviet students in their schoolyard. A friendship is born. When Vardan brings him home, the narrator enters a world of Armenian families living in the periphery of a prison where their husbands, sons, and fathers are detained. It is there, in the warmth of their home, that the narrator meets courage,...

Awarded the Soviet Union's highest military honor for his services during World War II, Ivan Dimitrovich Davidov watches his career dissolve into corrupt governnment practices and learns of the victimization of his former interpreter daughter, Olia.

A son drugs his mother so he can have sex with her. The woman, an exiled Russian princess in 1940s France, plays along, pretending to be unconscious, because the boy is a hemophiliac and will die soon. By the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers.