Title: A traitor's daughter
Description: "When I was a little girl living in Moscow, I didn't know who I was supposed to love, Our Father in heaven or Stalin in the Kremlin.".

Thus begins this autobiographical novel, whose cool, flat surface belies the tumultuousness of a young girl's coming of age in post-Revolutionary Russia. Born in 1925 to an aristocratic family in Leningrad, Anna Markov was surrounded by the comforts and privileges of wealth. Beautiful paintings and velvet chairs. The attention of servants. And the quiet sense of feeling safe among grown-ups who spent their evenings reading books or talking about art and music.

Slowly and steadily, however, the world Anna lived in turns dark, filled with poverty, hunger and fear. After her father abandons the family, her mother dies, and Anna enters the care of abusive grandparents. At school - once a refuge - her friends gradually, mysteriously disappear. She chronicles the beatings by her grandmother, her own growing attraction to alcohol and her sexual awakening, seemingly numb to painful changes imposed by the Stalinist regime.

Finally, two of her worst fears are realized: just before her sixteenth birthday, Anna is denounced as "daughter of a traitor to the regime" - and, after the German occupation, Anna's defiance results in her deportation to a forced labor camp.

A Traitor's Daughter describes Anna's passage through those years that should have been her childhood. This stark novel, which has been compared to works by Albert Camus and Nina Berberova, brings to life one of the most brutal periods of Soviet history: the years of Stalin's purges, gulags, and mass arrests - when revolutionaries pursued their dreams and children were pursued by nightmares.
Subjects: Fiction, History, Soviet union, fiction, Fiction, historical, general
Places: Soviet Union
Time periods: 1925-1953