Requiem for a Lost Empire

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This remarkable novel spans eighty years of the twentieth century, from the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers : "An epiphany of heartbreaking truth" ( The New York Times ). In this three-generational novel, Andreï Makine beautifully but unsparingly describes the almost uninterrupted succession of violence, misery, and horror that has been visited on the Russian people since the October Revolution of 1917. A young Russian army doctor is sent to distant shores to bind the wounds of those in Africa, the Near East, and South America who are pawns in the global political chess game during the Cold War. Recruited by an intelligence agent, he experiences the bloody reality of revolution on the ground. The book casts its eye back toward his grandfather Nikolai, a Red cavalry soldier fighting the Whites in 1920, and his father, whose story of World War II is invoked with a passion and force that bear comparison to the best writing on