- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial (4 Sep 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007178689
- ISBN-13: 978-0007178681
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,125,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Leninsky Prospekt
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Product Description
Review
‘High-octane … Powerful … A convincing and at times touching portrait of the evolution of a young marriage: the joy and idealism of falling in love followed by the insecurities and misunderstandings that unfold as husband and wife really get to know one another (in circumstances that would tax the best of us). Nina, fragile, troubled, beautiful and defiant, is an appealing heroine.’ Sunday Times
‘It is always a pleasure to encounter an author who tackles big ideas, complex relationships, ambitious themes, and has a woman as the protagonist. Bucknell has in abundance the resources to write powerful, moving, intense and intelligent fiction.’ Linda Grant, Observer
‘Delicately wrought, beautifully precise writing.’ Time Out
‘Katherine Bucknell is a fluent and relaxed writer.’ Lesley Chamberlain, Times Literary Supplement
‘Bucknell swathes her beautiful yet selfish heroine in the poisonous mist of Soviet oppression; she brings a vanished period to life with subtlety and makes Nina a heroine worthy of a complex situation.’ Metro
Sunday Times
‘a convincing and at times touching portrait of the evocation of a young marriage...a brave endeavour.’
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
For those who lived through it day by day, hour by hour, the tension of the Cuba missile crisis must have been excruciating. What a superb backdrop then, some forty years on, for a novel; although contemporary readers know how that story ended, the challenge for a novelist tackling the subject is to recreate the sense of dread foreboding which must at that time have overtaken ordinary peoples’ lives. That is, in the West; for although the crisis was played out in all the western press, in Russia, the ordinary woman or man in the Leninsky Prospekt would have been quite unaware of it all. So, set in Moscow and taking place over the few, heart-stopping days of the legendary stand-off, this novel weaves human conflicts into the historical and political drama. The author explores the partners in a bittersweet marriage: John, a straight up-and-down American diplomat playing his bit part on the world stage and Nina, a far more exotic and complex character, brought up as a child in Moscow of idealistic but ultimately destroyed and disillusioned Communist parents. Having fled as a teenager who had courted the revolutionaries, Nina returns now as the diplomat’s wife. In that role, she plays host to the visiting members of the New York City Ballet under the defector Balanchine, who were actually visiting Moscow at that time. But Nina yearns to be more than an onlooker in the ballet world where, with the Bolshoi, she had once trained. And so the confrontation between the old, Stalinist protégé Khrushchev and the young, idealistic JFK is played out in the tension between John and Nina, between the NYC Ballet members and their counterparts from the Bolshoi, and between Nina and her illicit and endangering relationships with her dissident, former friends. The period resonates with Pasternak, with Solzhenitsyn; the drabness of 1960’s Moscow is so vividly drawn it can almost be smelt; the characters are explored in depth and with compassion. How visceral are the freedoms to think, to write, to talk; how relevant are they still, forty years on; how evocatively are they here portrayed in this extraordinary book. Although the reader knows the outcome of the political story, she is gripped to the end by the turns and twists which fate holds for the ordinary people whose lives are so affected by these events.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I loved this book. It is an interesting story that reminds me of the times we listened as children to the grown ups discuss the scary Russians and the dark regime they lived under. I think the descriptions are more East Berlin than Moscow, but close enough, and credibly scary. The author is an incredibly gifted writer, and this is my favorite of her three books to date. Please write more, Ms. Bucknell, we need more of your insight.
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