A while back I started hyperventilating on Twitter about a book that had just come in that I had absolutely fallen for within the first pages. Well, it’s good to see that I’m not the only one - A Mountain of Crumbs, Elena Gorokhova’s luminous memoir about growing up in Soviet Russia, has already garnered rave reviews in the national press.
‘When you open a memoir set in Soviet times, the first thing you want to know is what sort of company you’ll be keeping for the next 300 pages. When I read, on page 1: “I wish my mother had come from Leningrad, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky … But she didn’t. She came from the provincial town of Ivanovo … She came from where they lick plates,” I knew this was going to be a dream ride.’ - Guardian
‘Gorokhova’s memoir looks back with love at the lost world of the dacha, of mushroom-picking in the forest, and the utterly reassuring homeland contrained within her mother’s apple-print polyester dress. Her prose brims with an elegiac emotion and sensuality which even Turgenev, in his own European exile, might have envied.’ The Spectator
‘[A] stunning memoir: subtle, yet brimming with depth and detail. It leaves you wanting more.’ - Daily Telegraph
‘[E]legantly dramatises the bewildering chasm between the projected, glittering idealism of the Soviet Union and its drab, quotidian reality.’ Metro
‘An exquisitly moving memoir…Her story of oppression and hope is described in distinctive poetical prose.’ Marie Claire
The Telegraph also ran an extract in Stella: read it here.
