| Author: | MICHAEL ASHTON | ISBN: | 1230000248359 |
| Publisher: | KSPRODUCTIONS | Publication: | June 18, 2014 |
| Imprint: | Language: | English |
| Author: | MICHAEL ASHTON |
| ISBN: | 1230000248359 |
| Publisher: | KSPRODUCTIONS |
| Publication: | June 18, 2014 |
| Imprint: | |
| Language: | English |
Russia, four years after the October revolution has overthrown the Tsar and brought the Bolsheviks to power and shaken the world order to its core. It is a time of war and famine as Lenin and his Communist government in the Politburo seek to enforce the Marx and Engels doctrine abolishing all private ownership and private property, while Trotsky and his Red Army battle foreign invaders, White Royalist armies, and competing separatist warlords. The Povolzhye famine, the most devastating in human history, kills 5 million and reduces desperate starving people to that most terrible of all measures, cannibalism. In the midst of this horror the Romanian gypsy Ushak, a man of high moral principle, living as an outsider in a small remote village nestled deep in the Samara Bend on the River Volga, must battle prejudice and hatred as both Romanian immigrant and gypsy and the threat his young daughter will be snatched as food, and at the same time he must fight to protect his family, to win survival, and to preserve the very soul of his humanity.
A brilliant first novel filled with existential themes of triumph and despair amid horror in the spirit of Kafka and Solzhenitsyn, set in a forgotten and neglected period of history where the core themes of hatred and fear of immigration resonate all too readily in our modern world.
Russia, four years after the October revolution has overthrown the Tsar and brought the Bolsheviks to power and shaken the world order to its core. It is a time of war and famine as Lenin and his Communist government in the Politburo seek to enforce the Marx and Engels doctrine abolishing all private ownership and private property, while Trotsky and his Red Army battle foreign invaders, White Royalist armies, and competing separatist warlords. The Povolzhye famine, the most devastating in human history, kills 5 million and reduces desperate starving people to that most terrible of all measures, cannibalism. In the midst of this horror the Romanian gypsy Ushak, a man of high moral principle, living as an outsider in a small remote village nestled deep in the Samara Bend on the River Volga, must battle prejudice and hatred as both Romanian immigrant and gypsy and the threat his young daughter will be snatched as food, and at the same time he must fight to protect his family, to win survival, and to preserve the very soul of his humanity.
A brilliant first novel filled with existential themes of triumph and despair amid horror in the spirit of Kafka and Solzhenitsyn, set in a forgotten and neglected period of history where the core themes of hatred and fear of immigration resonate all too readily in our modern world.
