The red scarf : [a novel] / Kate Furnivall.

Title :

The red scarf : [a novel]

Author:

Furnivall, Kate.

Format:

Books

Summary:

Once, Russia was a place split between breathtaking wealth and desperate poverty. Now, as the country conforms under Stalin's violent rule, a young woman becomes a fugitive, and a storied hero turns into a living, breathing man.

Language:

English

ISBN - ISSN:

9780425221648

0425221644

Physical Description:

470 pages ; 21 cm

General Note:

Subtitle from cover.

Subject:

Women prisoners -- Fiction.

Russia (Federation) -- Fiction.

First Title value, for Searching:

The red scarf : [a novel] / Kate Furnivall.

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Library	Audience	Home Location	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Central	Adult	Open Stacks Fiction	Open Stacks book	FURNI	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

The Russian Concubine dazzled readers. Now, its gifted author delivers another sweeping historical novel.

Davinsky Labor Camp, Siberia, 1933: Only two things in this wretched place keep Sofia from giving up hope: the prospect of freedom, and the stories told by her friend and fellow prisoner Anna, of a charmed childhood in Petrograd, and her fervent girlhood love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily.

After a perilous escape, Sofia endures months of desolation and hardship. But, clinging to a promise she made to Anna, she subsists on the belief that someday she will track down Vasily. In a remote village, she's nursed back to health by a Gypsy family, and there she finds more than refuge--she also finds Mikhail Pashin, who, her heart tells her, is Vasily in disguise. He's everything she has ever wanted--but he belongs to Anna.

After coming this far, Sofia is tantalizingly close to freedom, family--even a future. All that stands in her way is the secret past that could endanger everything she has come to hold dear!

Author Notes

Kate Furnivall is a British novelist, raised in Wales. She attended London University. Her first novel, The Russian Concubine, was published in 2007. Her historical novels include The Red Scarf, The Girl from Junchow, The Jewel of St. Petersburg, The White Pearl, Shadows on the Nile, Diamonds in the Dust, and The Liberation.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Sophia Morozova's relationship with fragile Anna Fedorina begins through a small act of kindness at a 1930s Siberian labor camp. As the two inmates struggle daily to survive, they increasingly rely on each other for hope and comfort; when Anna falls ill, Sophia escapes, intending to find Anna's lifelong love, Vasily, and rescue Anna. Beautiful and charismatic, Sophia quickly becomes a force to reckon with in the town of Tivil, where she hopes to find Vasily, and her connections with powerful gypsy Rafik, the handsome factory director Mikhail Pashin and the stern but unreadable Aleksei Fomenko become satisfying sources of danger and desire. Furnivall (The Russian Concubine) paints a stark picture of rampant scarcity, grim regimentation and blaring propaganda in pre-WWII Soviet Russia. In pushing the limits of Sophia and Anna's love and friendship, she nicely pits small lives against a monolithic state, paradoxically composed of watchful villages. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* As she did in The Russian Concubine (2007), Furnivall again pinpoints a little-known historical setting and brings it vividly to life through the emotions and insights of her characters. Moving somewhere between the romanticized Doctor Zhivago and the grisly Gulag Archipelago, this historical novel portrays the hardships of a Siberian labor camp in 1938 while at the same time dramatizing the philosophical convictions driving both Soviet leaders and the resistance. The story opens with Sofia and her tubercular friend, Anna, slinging sledgehammers in the frozen taiga. Anna's storytelling relieves the monotony of their existence while revealing her desperate yearning for her childhood friend, Vasily. Vowing to save Anna from certain death in the camp, Sofia lands on a plan to escape: to find Vasily and convince him to rescue Anna. A somewhat unrealistic but nevertheless riveting story follows: of Sofia's adventures crossing the tundra nearly undetected; her arrival in Tivil, where gypsy partisans shelter her; and her dogged efforts to find but not to fall in love with Vasily. Page by page the suspense builds until, with the certainty of doom, the reader races to the astonishing denouement. Beautifully detailed descriptions of the land and the compelling characters who move through a surprisingly upbeat plot make this one of the year's best reads.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2008 Booklist

Library Journal Review

Can a Russian Gypsy with mystical powers protect a wretched village from marauding soldiers and commissars? Does the daughter of a murdered priest succeed in springing her best friend from a Siberian labor camp? Will an innocent victim of the Gulag find her true love? Furnivall, whose previous novel, The Russian Concubine, was set in 1920s China, now moves to Siberia in 1933, when Stalin's agricultural collectivization policies sent millions to their deaths. Following the path of Dr. Zhivago and the more recent The People's Act of Love, this romantic confection can make a reader shiver with dread for the horrors visited on the two heroines imprisoned in a labor camp and quiver with anticipation for their happy endings. Furnivall shows she has the narrative skills to deliver a sweeping historical epic, but we get too much of a good thing with a too-convoluted plot and repetitive sufferings. Still, the novel arrives in time for great beach reading and will fit well into the popular fiction collections of most large public libraries.--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.