Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. Hoover’s ( November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.Īt first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for October)

Despite the preponderance of names that repeat themselves from one generation to the next (the plot is littered with very old or very young Arinas and Maryushkas, for example)-a circumstance that may befuddle the casual reader-Rutherfurd's opus extraordinaire may captivate readers of the genre as well as serious history buffs. Rutherfurd's immense canvas allows a fictional cast in the hundreds to populate the same world as Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, Tolstoy, Voltaire, Pushkin, Lenin, Stalin, Shevchenko, Rasputin, etc., as they grapple with catastrophic events-such as ritual self-immolation, torture by knouting, cholera, and the pogroms. Through the intricacies of marriage, accidents of birth, and other twists and turns of fate, the ancestors and descendants of these proud people move from one century to the next, turning up as warring Alans, barbarous Tatars, bloodthirsty Cossacks, and eventually the more familiar Socialists, Bolsheviks, and Marxists. The primary storyline that finally emerges depicts three rival families who have ties in the quintessential village of Russka: the Bobrovs, gentried noblemen who ultimately lose their precious land to the very serfs they once owned the cunning Suvorins who amass great wealth as merchants and industrialists and their distant relations the Romanovs, peasant farmers-cum- revolutionaries. Crammed with exhaustive and obviously well-researched historical, geographical, and cultural detail, this epic novel traces Russia's quest for freedom and identity from A.D. A well-written, episodic, dense, at times infuriatingly complex historical saga of Russia by the author of the similarly massive Sarum, which tries-often quite successfully-to re-create the evolution of a mysterious and backward nation riddled with war, political confusion, and religious upheaval.

Edward rutherfurd paris review