The Red Scarf
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4.3 • 24 Ratings
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The Russian Concubine dazzled readers. Now, its gifted author delivers another sweeping historical novel.
Davinsky Labor Camp, Siberia, 1933: Only two things in this wretched place keep Sofia from giving up hope: the prospect of freedom, and the stories told by her friend and fellow prisoner Anna, of a charmed childhood in Petrograd, and her fervent girlhood love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily.
After a perilous escape, Sofia endures months of desolation and hardship. But, clinging to a promise she made to Anna, she subsists on the belief that someday she will track down Vasily. In a remote village, she's nursed back to health by a Gypsy family, and there she finds more than refuge--she also finds Mikhail Pashin, who, her heart tells her, is Vasily in disguise. He's everything she has ever wanted--but he belongs to Anna.
After coming this far, Sofia is tantalizingly close to freedom, family--even a future. All that stands in her way is the secret past that could endanger everything she has come to hold dear!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sophia Morozova's relationship with fragile Anna Fedorina begins through a small act of kindness at a 1930s Siberian labor camp. As the two inmates struggle daily to survive, they increasingly rely on each other for hope and comfort; when Anna falls ill, Sophia escapes, intending to find Anna's lifelong love, Vasily, and rescue Anna. Beautiful and charismatic, Sophia quickly becomes a force to reckon with in the town of Tivil, where she hopes to find Vasily, and her connections with powerful gypsy Rafik, the handsome factory director Mikhail Pashin and the stern but unreadable Aleksei Fomenko become satisfying sources of danger and desire. Furnivall (The Russian Concubine) paints a stark picture of rampant scarcity, grim regimentation and blaring propaganda in pre-WWII Soviet Russia. In pushing the limits of Sophia and Anna's love and friendship, she nicely pits small lives against a monolithic state, paradoxically composed of watchful villages.
