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Growing Up in Communist Russia
by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
The prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age and finding her voice amid the hardships of Stalinist Russia.
Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel - the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles - Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation - of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer.
As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing - of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food - we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged.
"Petrushevskaya is the definition of incorrigible and indomitable, both on the page and in her life." - Publishers Weekly
"A terse, spirited memoir that reads like a picaresque novel." - Kirkus
This information about The Girl from the Metropol Hotel was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen volumes of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR's Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction; There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories; and There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family. A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia's most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement.
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