About the Author:
Olga Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971. She studied at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow State University, and Emory University. Her short fiction has appeared in Partisan Review, Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, and Art Times. This is her first novel. Grushin, who became an American citizen in 2002, lives in Washington, D.C.
From Booklist:
In 1962, Igor Stravinsky, long an expatriate, agreed to return to Russia for one concert. The line for tickets began a year before the event and evolved into a kind of microsociety, with those in the queue interacting almost like family. Grushin (The Dream Life of Sukhanov, 2006) focuses on one family in the line, a husband (a frustrated musician) and his mother, wife, and son. The novel moves at an excruciatingly slow pace—How could a story about waiting in a line do otherwise?—but, remarkably, it also generates considerable suspense: not suspense in the thriller sense, exactly, more like agonizing concern for these tortured souls who have come to invest so much of themselves in the idea of reaching the head of the line. A concert, yes, but it’s far more than that. Whether they intend to keep their ticket, sell it, or give it away, that small piece of paper represents an escape from the quotidian grayness of Soviet Russia—a rare exclamation point in a life of ellipses. Grushin works the metaphor brilliantly, but she never loses sight of the painful reality behind it. --Bill Ott
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