San Antonio College Library

Focuses on the brutal and dehumanizing aspects of life in a Russian concentration camp.

An orphan reflects on the unbreakable bond between love and freedom in the Soviet Union. In Soviet Russia the desire for freedom is also a desire for the freedom to love. Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance. Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him: a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another;...

Two novellas that trace the fate of Jews displaced from a Polish village in World War II. One man becomes a colonel in the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, another is deported to the Warsaw ghetto from where he is sent to a Nazi death camp.

"In "Queen of Spades," Anna, a successful ophthalmologic surgeon in her sixties; her daughter, Katya; and Katya's teenage daughter and young son live in constant terror of Anna's mother, a domineering, autocratic, aging former beauty queen. In "Angel," a closeted middle-aged professor marries an uneducated charwoman for love of her young son, raising the child in his image. In "The Orlov Sokolovs," perfectly matched young lovers are pulled apart by...

Awarded the Soviet Union's highest military honor for his services during World War II, Ivan Dimitrovich Davidov watches his career dissolve into corrupt governnment practices and learns of the victimization of his former interpreter daughter, Olia.

"From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons. Unsparing and poignant, Mikhail Iossel's twenty stories of Soviet childhood and adulthood,...

"A magnificent novel that sweeps from the Russia of the Revolution through the horrors of the Purges and the Second World War, to the inner tensions and complex realities of the Soviet Union today. A renowned author, Harrison Salisbury, whose unsurpassed intimate knowledge of modern Russia make him uniquely able to create one of the most electrifying and inspiring reading experiences of our time."--Goodreads

Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian emigre living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife.

"Robert Harris meets Gorky Park in Child 44, Tom Rob Smith's stunning thriller--sure to be one of the most talked about debut novels of the year"--Provided by the publisher. Set in the Soviet Union in 1953, Tom Rob Smith's debut novel is both a thriller and a harrowing portrayal of the terror inflicted upon people by their own governments. An officer of the Ministry of State Security risks everything -- even becoming an enemy of the state -- to find...