Blogs in April 2020

The Adventures of China Iron 2nd April 2020

1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through...

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Dead Souls 1st April 2020

Nikolai Gogol’s ‘epic poem in prose’, Dead Souls is a damning indictment of a corrupt society, translated from the Russian with an introduction and notes by Robert A. Maguire in Penguin Classics. Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the...

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Fathers and Sons 1st April 2020

Considered one of Ivan Turgenev’s finest works, Fathers and Sons was the first of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels to achieve international renown. A stirring tale of generational conflict during a period of social revolution, it vividly depicts the...

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Peter the Great: His Life and World 1st April 2020

Against the monumental canvas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia, Robert K. Massie unfolds the extraordinary story of Peter the Great. A volatile feudal tsar with a taste for barbaric torture; a progressive and enlightened reformer of government...

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The Last Days of the Romanov Dancers 1st April 2020

Petrograd, 1914. A country on a knife edge. The story of two people caught in the middle – with everything to lose… A stunning debut from a talented new Australian voice in historical fiction. Valentina Yershova’s position in the...

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