"On a crisp September morning, trouble comes to the Gorbatovs' farm. Having fled revolution and civil war in Russia, the family has worked tirelessly to establish themselves as crop farmers in Provence, their hopes of returning home a distant dream. While young Ilya Stepanovich is committed to this new way of life, his step-brother Vasya looks only to the past. With the arrival of a letter from Paris, a plot to lure Vasya back to Russia begins in earnest, and Ilya must set out for the capital to try to preserve his family's fragile stability."--

Nina Berberova (1901-1993) was a Russian-born writer, academic, editor and translator. Raised in St Petersburg, she left Russia in 1922 and lived in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Italy before settling in Paris. There she published widely in the émigré press and wrote the stories and novels for which she is now known. Berberova emigrated to the United States in 1950 and eventually took up academic posts at Yale and later Princeton. In France she was honoured as a chevalier of l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Marian Schwartz is a prize-winning translator of Russian fiction, history, biography, criticism, and fine art. She is the principal English translator of the works of Nina Berberova and translated the New York Times bestseller The Last Tsar, by Edvard Radzinsky, as well as classics by Mikhail Bulgakov, Ivan Goncharov, Yuri Olesha, and Mikhail Lermontov. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships and is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association.