In many respects, Their Four Hearts is a book of endings and final things. Vladimir Sorokin wrote it in the year the Soviet Union collapsed and then didn't write fiction for ten years after completing it--his next book being the infamous Blue Lard, which he wrote in 1998. Without exaggerating too much, one might call it the last book of the Russian twentieth century and Blue Lard the first book of the Russian twenty-first century. It is a novel about...

After escaping a Soviet prison camp, Lina is pursued by a powerful witch and her shadow wolves in a story that imbues frozen wilderness with fairy-tale magic. All that twelve-year-old Lina knows of the world is the Stalinist labor camp where she was born, a place of hunger, cruelty, and deprivation. After a daring escape into the frigid Siberian wilds with her best friend, Bogdan, Lina vows to reach Moscow and find her long-lost grandmother, whom...

Pregnant and adrift in the countryside amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War, Marina returns to a decimated Petrograd, where her work caring for war orphans inspires her emergence as a poet. --

Having completed her mission to silence an agency defector, CIA operative Cassie Bradbury finds herself cut adrift in Moscow with no documents, no tickets and no identification. Hot on her trail are the Kremlin, the Russian Mafia - and Sean Ravensdale, the disgraced ex-CIA agent who has been sent to track her down. Realizing that she has been set up and is now expendable, Cassie will need all her courage and resourcefulness to outwit her pursuers...

Marina Makarova is a woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life. Swept up on the tides of the Russian Revolution, Marina joins the marches for workers' rights, falls in love with a radical young poet, and betrays everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn. As her country goes through tremendous upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion, devastating loss, and the private...

It is 1914, and the world has been on the brink of war so often, many New Yorkers treat the subject with only passing interest. Eliza Ferriday is thrilled to be traveling to St. Petersburg with Sofya Streshnayva, a cousin of the Romanovs. The two met years ago one summer in Paris and became close confidantes. Now Eliza embarks on the trip of a lifetime, home with Sofya to see the splendors of Russia: the church with the interior covered in jeweled...

Sarah Zuckerman and Jennifer Jones are best friends in an upscale part of Washington, D.C., in the politically charged 1980s. Sarah is the shy, wary product of an unhappy home: her father abandoned the family to return to his native England; her agoraphobic mother is obsessed with fears of nuclear war. Jenny is an all-American girl who has seemingly perfect parents. With Cold War rhetoric reaching a fever pitch in 1982, the ten-year-old girls write...

After a harrowing escape from Russian agents on his last mission, Charles Jenkins thinks he's finally done with the spy game. But then the final two of the seven sisters--American assets who have been deep undercover in Russia for decades--cut off all communication with their handlers. Are they in hiding after detecting surveillance? Or have they turned and become double agents? It's Jenkins's duty to find out, but he's been added to a Russian kill...

The late 1800s find fourteen-year-old Batya in the Russian countryside, fleeing with her family endless pogroms. Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who can guarantee his daughter an easy life and passage to America. Feeling like a princess in a fairytale, Batya leaves her old life behind as she is whisked away to a new world. But soon she discovers that she's entered a waking nightmare. Her...