Days in the Caucasus-Fast Shipping

Description

Ascintillatingly witty memoir telling the story of a young woman’s determinedstruggle for freedom

We all know families that are poor but ‘respectable’. Mine, incontrast, was extremely rich but not ‘respectable’ at all…

This is the extraordinary memoir of an ‘odd, rich, exotic’ childhood – ofgrowing up in Azerbaijan in the turbulent early twentieth century, caughtbetween East and West, tradition and modernity.

Banine remembers her luxurious home, with endless feasts of sweets andfruit; her beloved, flaxen-haired German governess; her imperious, swearing,strict Muslim grandmother; her bickering, poker-playing, chain-smokingrelatives. She recalls how the Bolsheviks came, and they lost , amid revolution and bloodshed, she fell passionately in love, only to beforced into marriage with a man she loathed- until the chance of escapearrived.

By turns gossipy and romantic, wry and moving, Days in the Caucasus is acoming-of-age story and a portrait of a vanished world, and of how the pasthaunts us.