About this ebook
“An impressively accomplished retelling of the Gatsby story,” in which a Russian businessman engages an impoverished bookseller’s help pursuing a lover. (Los Angeles Review of Books)
On a rainy afternoon in London’s old Chelsea, a charming multi-billionaire Russian oligarch, Gorsky, walks into an ailing bookshop and writes the first of several quarter-of-a-million pound checks. With that money, Gorsky has tasked Nikola, the store’s bored and brilliant clerk, with sourcing books for a massive personal library, which will be housed in the magnificent, palatial home Gorsky happens to be building immediately next to Nikola’s own modest dwelling. Gorsky needs a tasteful collection of Russian literature to woo a long-lost love―no matter that she happens to be married to an Englishman. His passion for her surpasses even his immeasurable wealth, and Nikola will be drawn into a world of opulence, greed, capitalism, sex, and beauty as he helps Gorsky pursue this doomed love.
“An accomplished retelling of an American classic.” —Tablet
“It’s a very clever idea: to update "The Great Gatsby” by making the bootlegger into a Russian arms-dealing billionaire and transplanting the action from Jazz Age New York to 21st-century London, a city increasingly shaped by global wealth.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A tense, witty page-turner.” —The Spectator
“Entertaining.” —New York Journal of Books
“[A] kind of novel-length love letter to the written word.” —Jewish Book Council
On a rainy afternoon in London’s old Chelsea, a charming multi-billionaire Russian oligarch, Gorsky, walks into an ailing bookshop and writes the first of several quarter-of-a-million pound checks. With that money, Gorsky has tasked Nikola, the store’s bored and brilliant clerk, with sourcing books for a massive personal library, which will be housed in the magnificent, palatial home Gorsky happens to be building immediately next to Nikola’s own modest dwelling. Gorsky needs a tasteful collection of Russian literature to woo a long-lost love―no matter that she happens to be married to an Englishman. His passion for her surpasses even his immeasurable wealth, and Nikola will be drawn into a world of opulence, greed, capitalism, sex, and beauty as he helps Gorsky pursue this doomed love.
“An accomplished retelling of an American classic.” —Tablet
“It’s a very clever idea: to update "The Great Gatsby” by making the bootlegger into a Russian arms-dealing billionaire and transplanting the action from Jazz Age New York to 21st-century London, a city increasingly shaped by global wealth.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A tense, witty page-turner.” —The Spectator
“Entertaining.” —New York Journal of Books
“[A] kind of novel-length love letter to the written word.” —Jewish Book Council
About the author
Vesna Goldsworthy is a Serbian poet and writer living in London. She is author of three books: Inventing Ruritania; a memoir of her childhood in Yugoslavia, Chernobyl Strawberries, which was published to great acclaim in 2005 by Atlantic; and the Crashaw Prize-winning poetry collection, The Angel of Salonika (2011), greeted by the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee as "a welcome new voice in English poetry", and one of The Times Poetry Books of the Year.
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