At Costco the other day, I allowed myself to browse the book section. This is a dangerous practice, being I'm such a lover of books, and the prices there are so reasonable (for new books). I finally decided upon the P.D. James book, and reading the cover of a novel, found myself intrigued:
I don't remember exactly what the jacket said, but an old woman had kept a series of journals in a suitcase. Her daughter found them after her death, and realised that they were not, after all journals, but a novel the woman had written over the course of her life, based on her own experiences. Those notebooks comprised the novel in my hand.
Well, somehow between reading that description, and showing the book to my mum, I realised I had switched the books and bought something entirely different. What a lucky accident! The new book was The Russlander and I loved it. I've always been drawn to read about the period of time surrounding the revolution in Russia. This one tells of the Mennonite community in what is now the Ukraine...here's the description from the back of the book:
Katherine (Katya) Vogt is now an old woman living in Winnipeg, but the story of how she and her family came to Canada begins in Russia in 1910, on a wealthy Mennonite estate. Here they lived in a world bounded by thte prosperity of their landlords and by the poverty and disgruntlement of hte Russian workers who toil on the estate. But in the wake of the First World War, the tensions engulfing the country begin to intrude on the community, leading to an unspeakeable act of violence. In the aftermath of that violence, and in the difficult years that follow, Kathya tries to come to terms with the terrible events that befell her and her family. In lucid, spellbinding prose, Birdsell vividly evokes time and place, and the unease that existed in a country on the brink of revolutionary change...
