One boy. Two nations. Two ideologies.
A thrilling and ambitious novel about identity and the overwhelming power of culture that shows us how, even at the darkest corners of history, life finds a way.
Madrid, Winter of 1938
Clotilde, a graphic artist that draws cartoons for republican newspapers, spends the last months of the Civil War in Madrid. The fall of the Republic is imminent, so her husband, a communist militant working for the Russians, must send their son, Pablo, only five years old, to Moscow against her will. Clotilde resists with all her might, but can’t stop commander Boris Petrov from embarking on this dangerous journey through a Spain in flames to fulfil his comrade’s wish and deliver Pablo to the Soviet Union, where Stalin is erecting a new country on top of the ruins of the old regime.
Moscow, Spring of 1939
There he is greeted by his new family. Touched by his tragic exile, they affectionally welcome an exhausted and sick boy. Anya immediately takes care of Pablo as if he were her own son, making no distinction between him and Igor, Pablo’s adoptive brother. Daughter and wife of two proud heroes of the Revolution—her father fought next to Lenin, her husband under Stalin—Anya loves poetry and music, dubious and bourgeois interests in the eyes of the authorities. While her illusions capsize within the increasingly oppressive Stalinist terror, her spirit rebels against injustice, misery, the absence of freedom, and the Gulag.
Pablo grows up between the ever-more tenuous memory of his mother, relentless in her efforts to get him back, and Anya’s love, who shares with him her love for music, for literature, and her yearning for freedom. Two women united by a boy’s fate, both reflected in the same mirror: the totalitarian ideologies the twentieth century succumbed to.
You may lose a war, and yet earn your freedom.
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