The Orchard

“[A] stunning debut . . . . Gorcheva-Newberry pulls off a tragic and nostalgic love letter to a much-tried generation. This is a winner.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Gorcheva-Newberry does the reader a great service, offering a peek behind the Iron Curtain and its veil of propaganda . . . . If there is such a thing as clear-eyed sentimentality, The Orchard evokes it, with its warts-and-all recollections of youthful passions, when the road ahead seems like one endless string of possibilities.”—BookPage (starred review)

“A magnificent story . . . Gorcheva-Newberry’s novel is a tour de force regarding the indelible marks written on young lives during desperate social and political times.”—Midwest Book Review

“The Orchard is a novel that engages with the paradoxical way in which youth opens one up to the world and that same quality is lost within it.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Aching and sexy, clear-eyed and heartbreaking, honest and necessary. You will devour it. The Orchard is an exquisite, explosive debut.”—Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth

“Charming and tragic, hopeful and disillusioned, profoundly intimate and sensitive to history. With exquisite lyricism, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry recalls what it meant to grow up in Moscow in the 1980s.”—Ken Kalfus, author of Envy and 2 A.M. in Little America

“The Orchard is a beautiful portrayal of life lived in enormous change and upheaval; it is a novel worth of the master.”—Richard Bausch, author of Peace

“Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry brings us a timeless tale of memory, desire, dreams lost and altered, love changed and unchanged.”—Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go

“In The Orchard, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry has given us a deeply personal coming-of-age story with unapologetic sensuality and impressive scope. . . This is a sublime novel.”—Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men and Paris, He Said

“The term ‘Chekovian’ gets tossed around far too freely these days, but in the case of Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s beautiful novelistic debut, nothing less will suffice…. This novel is a gem, and its author is a major new voice in contemporary fiction.”—Steve Yarborough, author of The Unmade World

“The Orchard is extraordinary. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry captures a generation’s coming of age during Perestroika with aching empathy, and in language that is by turns transcendent and unsparing. She delivers an electrifying novel, brimming with passion, pathos, and searing insights. I literally didn’t want the novel to end.”—Jennifer Cody Epstein, author of Wunderland

“Gorcheva-Newberry conveys the poignance of adolescent urgency with a poet’s elliptical dash. The Orchard is a great pleasure.”—Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood