Publisher’s Weekly described this as a “confident, carefully crafted” debut, and so it is. It looks at the affairs, both romantic and political, of writers in Stalinist Russia, looking at the intertwined lives of poet Osip Mandelstam and satirist Mikhail Bulgakov, as well as the Margarita who inspired the latter’s The Master and Margarita. A book about authoritarian crackdown on speech and satire that is sadly timely.
