Paperback.

Library Journal--

Set in Moscow in 1913, this tale chronicles several months in the life of Frank Reid, who is mysteriously deserted by his wife and must engage the simple peasant girl Lisa Ivanova to care for his three small children. Reid plods along in a remarkably mundane existence, relating to everyone with an amazing, unflagging apathy. Even an armed student radical who breaks into his shop and shoots at him cannot stir him to action. Lisa, to her credit, manages to stir him briefly to passion. The sole bright spot in this otherwise bleak, boring saga is Reid's hilariously precocious daughter, Dolly, whose abrupt, insightful comments are priceless. In this story, resolved anticlimactically in the last line of the text, there is very little spring, but a lot of grim, eternal winter.-- Ronald L. Coombs, SUNY Health Science Ctr. at Brooklyn Lib.

I keep confusing myself. I always think it's Fitzgerald's work I like when it's really Penelope Lively's books I fancy.

The writing for this novel is good- but it is entirely Russian, by which I mean it is crisp and spare with an air of depression about it.

[r] Reserved for NMReader, winner of the Winter Doldrums book draw.

RELEASE NOTES:

Via post.

Arrived today - thank you so much