9780618534401

A sweeping transcontinental novel of secrets and lies buried within a single family Thirty-two-year-old Gabriel Glover arrives in St. Petersburg to find his mother dead in her apartment. Reeling from grief, Gabriel and his twin sister, Isabella, arrange the funeral without contacting their father, Nicholas, a brilliant and manipulative libertine. Unknown to the twins, their mother had long ago abandoned a son, Arkady, a pitiless Russian predator now determined to claim his birthright. Aided by an ex-seminarian whose heroin addiction is destroying him, Arkady sets out to find the siblings and uncover the dark secret hidden from them their entire lives. Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, Pravda is a darkly funny, compulsively readable, and hauntingly beautiful chronicle of discovery and loss, love and loyalty, and the destructive legacy of deceit.

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Edward Docx is the author of the acclaimed The Calligrapher, named a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. He lives in London.

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Part I OCTOBER The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure, to live it you have to explode. -Bob Dylan, "Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)" LOVE AND CHAOS 1 Gabriel Glover He was relieved to be again among the Russians. Nothing to do with his head, or even his heart, but in his soul: some kind of internal alignment or tessellation. He looked up at the clock on the wall above the brown lift doors. He'd lost two hours with the delays. But the London panic had given way to cool urgency, a calculating haste. There would be the visa and passport queues. There would be the usual wrangle with the taxi driver-unless he agreed up front to pay the tourist price. And then there would be traffic on Moskovsky . . . An hour and a quarter and he should be there. The doors opened. The other Europeans and the Americans hesitated. He pushed his way inside with the Russians and a Finnish businessman with a tatty attache. Everyone was already smoking. He squashed up and breathed it in: the flavor of the tobacco-more aromatic, smokier. An old woman swathed in a heavy black shawl with her hair tied up in a scalp-tightening white bun began shouldering her myriad straps, grasping numberless bags, grimly determined to be the first out. But he was quicker. He walked swiftly across the vast immigration hall-the high two-tone walls, light Soviet tan at the base and dark Soviet mahogany at the top. There were only two queues for nonresidents. He had hoped for three or four. The first was shorter but comprised disorderly families and excited tourists; the second was mainly businessmen, money people. Follow the money. Money, after all, had won. He put down his bag. These last few miles always seemed such an incremental agony, especially when the previous thousand he had scorched across the curve of the Earth. And now the candor that he had been evading for the past thirty-six hours finally ambushed him: okay, yes, it was true, this call had been different. Much worse. Something was really wrong. Something serious. Otherwise why would he have gone straight to the airport this morning and taken the first flight via Hel-bloody-sinki? The slab-faced man in the booth looked up from the pages of the passport and met his eyes through the bulletproof glass. "Your name?" "Gabriel Glover." "How old are you?" "Thirty-two." There was a long scrutinizing pause, as if the official were formulating a difficult third question, something beginning with "why." Gabriel straightened up, consciously pulling his shoulders back, as both Lina and Connie reminded him to do-one thing at least they had in common-and stood with proper posture at his full fiveeleven. He was dressed half scruffily, in cheap jeans and scuffed boots, and half elegantly, in a dark tailored pure wool suit jacket and fine white shirt-as though he had not been able to make up his mind about who he really was or which side he was on when he set out. He had the figure of someone thin through restlessness, through exercise of the mind rather than of the body; he had liquid dark eyes and his hair was near-black and kicked and kinked at the ends, not so much a style as a lack of one, stylishly passing itself off. Immigration officials usually had him down as Mediterranean before they opened up his passport: Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires . . . The official's silence was becoming a test of stamina. He felt the urge to say something-anything-whatever confession was most required. But at last the Russian gave a grotesque smile followed by a parody of that long-suffering American imperative: "Enjoy." "Thank you." And his passport was r

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Pravda

Pravda

0618534407

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