The Orchard - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry Klappentext Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union - but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Coming of age in the USSR in the 1980s, best friends Anya and Milka try to envision a free and joyful future for themselves. They spend their summers at Anya's dacha just outside of Moscow, lazing in the apple orchard, listening to Queen songs, and fantasizing about trips abroad and the lives of American teenagers. Meanwhile, Anya's parents talk about World War II, the Blockade, and the hardships they have endured. By the time the girls are fifteen, the Soviet Empire is on the verge of collapse. They pair up with classmates Trifonov and Lopatin, and the four friends share secrets, desires, and all the turbulent and carefree pleasures of youth. But the world is changing, and the fleeting time they have together is cut short by a sudden tragedy. Years later, Anya returns to Russia from America, where she has chosen a different kind of life, far from her family and the bittersweet memories of her friends. When she meets Lopatin again, he is a smug businessman who wants to buy her parents' dacha. Anya comes to the stark realization that memory does not fade or disappear; rather, it moves us across time, connecting our past to our future, joys to sorrows. This powerful novel speaks to how we experience and process grief - for a beloved friend, a cherished ideal for a country, or for youth itself. Leseprobe 1 Milka Putova and I had been friends since the first grade, which was pretty much for as long as I could remember. She was short and thin like a sprat, and every boy in our class called her exactly that—Sprat. She had small acorn-brown eyes, set too far apart and slanted—a result of one hundred and fifty years of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, as she often joked. Her face was broad and pale, her pulpy lips raspberry red, especially in winter, after we’d been sledding or building forts all afternoon, snow crusted on our knees and elbows, our bangs and eyelashes bleached with frost. We lived on the outskirts of Moscow and tramped to school together, across a vast virgin field sprawled around us like white satin. She’d walk first through knee-deep snow, wearing wool tights and felt boots, threading her legs in and out, and I’d trudge after her, stepping in her footprints. She’d halt and scribble our names in the snow with her gloved finger—Milka + Anya—and on the way back we’d rush to check whether the letters were still there. Milka’s hair was dark gold, straight and silky, cut in a neat bob around her jaw. She shampooed her hair every day, and I could smell it when we sat next to each other during classes, the delicate scent of apple blossoms resurrecting our summer months at my parents’ dacha. How we’d sauntered through a corn maze, the stalks three times taller than we were, fingering green husks, separating soft, luscious silk to check on the size and ripeness of ears. Or how we roamed birch and aspen groves and gathered mushrooms for soup, their fragile trunks buried in grass, their red and orange caps burning under the trees like gems. Or how we swam in the river, racing to the other side and back and then climbing a muddy bank and drying off on towels, motionless like sunbaked frogs—bellies up. At ten, we hadn’t yet begun wearing bikini tops or shying behind bushes while changing swimsuits. We touched each other’s faces, and shoulders, and nonexistent breasts, compared hands and feet, the length of our toes and fingers, noses, eyelashes, the color and shape of our nipples. We counted moles and freckles, mosquito bites and scratches, searching for hidden birthmarks, gray hairs, some sign of indisputable distinction. We lazed in a hammock, suspended between the porch railing and a single pine tree, or thre...

Product details

• Authors: Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry
• Publisher: Ballantine
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 07.03.2023
• EAN: 9780593356036
• ISBN: 978-0-593-35603-6
• No. of pages: 400
• Dimensions: 131 mm x 202 mm x 21 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Fiction > Narrative literature > Contemporary literature (from 1945)