strikingly visual...there are numerous searing images: a ragged choir singing on the front line of a snow-covered battlefield as lives are snuffed out around them; the moment of clarity when Volsky realises that the siege has changed Mila beyond recognition; the brief glimpse of a red-headed boy running after the car bearing away the closest thing he has to parents. ... Read more
Wendy Ide, Times
Pulls the reader's emotions tight... It is a beautiful story
Peter Lansley, The Times August 6 2011
deeply poignant
David Charter, The Times Saturday Book club
told with an intimacy made potent by Makine's lyrical, spare prose and Strachan's lucid translation... reconnects both the reader and the protagonist with Russia's blood soaked history, to startling effect
The Financial Times
Thrilling...Makine's most beautiful novel since Le Testament Francais
Le Figaro
His novels possess an eerie beauty invariably capable of surpassing the polemic...If he has an artistic kindred spirit it is most probably the South African Nobel laureate JM Coetzee
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
A powerful, thoughtful book about the reliability of memory and how time mutates the meaning of both literature and history.
Tina Jackson, Metro
Seamlessly translated by Geoffrey Strachan, Makine's novel explores the attempt of two 'ordinary' people to transcend suffering and find life's essential meaning. It is difficult to write without sentimentality about such a subject, but Makine's intelligence and truthfulness dismiss banality.
Pamela Norris, Literary Review
'Thoughtful and humane'
Kate Saunders, The Times
Makine is a consummate literary artist, but he is teacher as well as storyteller and, best of all, enchanter
Allan Massie, Scotsman
Like all his work, this novel has a wonderful flavour of a contemporary Checkhov with a splash of Proust...What starts out an intimate account bursts out into something more ambitious and universal. Ultimately it's a haunting story, beautifully told
Viv Groskop, Observer
Makine's laconic, sardonic portrait of the new Russia is laced with fury...a bold and eloquent novel
Helen Dunmore, Guardian
It is impossible to exaggerate the power of this short, unbearably poignant novel. It is both brutal and lyrical. Makine consciously invokes Chekhov but his grasp of history is positively Tolstoy-like in scale. I can't think of a writer who would be a more deserving recipient of the Nobel literature prize.
Mail on Sunday
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