Anna Karenina as rewritten by Jackie Collins.
An aging Russian princess looks back on her life.
As Anna Mayakovsky shuffles along Kilburn Lane, on good days as far as Harrow Road, her greatest fear is that her great-granddaughters, Sonia and Jennifer, will whisk her out of her tiny flat and put her in a home. An unworthy end, she reflects, for someone who once dined with the Romanovs. Although she was born a peasant, a local nobleman who owned a vast estate near her village approached Anna’s father one day and, for a few rubles, was allowed to bring her home to be raised along with his children, Misha and Mariamna. Anna doesn't know why she's there, and while the Count is kind to her, Countess Olga, his wife, taunts her mercilessly about her humble origins. Eventually strong, generous Prince Konstantin Mayakovsky takes comely Anna, already pregnant with Misha’s child, to his palace in St. Petersburg to become his wife. As the Princess Mayakovsky, Anna becomes the friend and confidante of Czar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra (although privately she thinks them terribly bourgeois). She becomes the mother to her son, Nicholas, named for her husband’s patron. She also becomes a Bolshevik spy. Later, as the Revolution unfolds, Lenin and Stalin rely on her good counsel in their quest to transform Russia. Anna’s sexual adventures are as prodigious as her political exploits. After her initiation in carnal delights by Misha, she takes as her lover dreamy revolutionary Sasha Krasnov, who’s eventually exiled to Siberia. She also beds boorish factory owner Peter Nechaev, who despite his exploitation of his mill workers rocks her world. Rasputin invites her to “Take the staff of my love in your mouth” but ultimately punks out. She gives birth to a second child, Tania, but loses her to the growing chaos that envelops her homeland.
Anna Karenina as rewritten by Jackie Collins.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8645-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.
A novel of sharply drawn character studies immersed in more than 250 hard, transformative years in the African-American diaspora.
Gyasi’s debut novel opens in the mid-1700s in what is now Ghana, as tribal rivalries are exploited by British and Dutch colonists and slave traders. The daughter of one tribal leader marries a British man for financial expediency, then learns that the “castle” he governs is a holding dungeon for slaves. (When she asks what’s held there, she’s told “cargo.”) The narrative soon alternates chapters between the Ghanans and their American descendants up through the present day. On either side of the Atlantic, the tale is often one of racism, degradation, and loss: a slave on an Alabama plantation is whipped “until the blood on the ground is high enough to bathe a baby”; a freedman in Baltimore fears being sent back South with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act; a Ghanan woman is driven mad from the abuse of a missionary and her husband’s injury in a tribal war; a woman in Harlem is increasingly distanced from (and then humiliated by) her husband, who passes as white. Gyasi is a deeply empathetic writer, and each of the novel’s 14 chapters is a savvy character portrait that reveals the impact of racism from multiple perspectives. It lacks the sweep that its premise implies, though: while the characters share a bloodline, and a gold-flecked stone appears throughout the book as a symbolic connector, the novel is more a well-made linked story collection than a complex epic. Yet Gyasi plainly has the talent to pull that off: “I will be my own nation,” one woman tells a British suitor early on, and the author understands both the necessity of that defiance and how hard it is to follow through on it.
A promising debut that’s awake to emotional, political, and cultural tensions across time and continents.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94713-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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