Isolde

A family of Russian émigrés seeks refuge in Jazz Age-era Paris in this “enthralling . . . compellingly conflicted portrait” of love, deceit, and wayward youth by a pioneering Russian writer (Guardian)

Left to her own devices in Biarritz, fourteen-year-old Russian Liza meets an older English boy, Cromwell, on a beach. He thinks he has found a magical, romantic beauty and insists upon calling her Isolde; she is taken with his Buick and ability to pay for dinner and champagne.

Disaffected and restless, Liza, her brother Nikolai, and her boyfriend Andrei enjoy Cromwell’s company in restaurants and jazz bars after he follows Liza back to Paris—until his mother stops giving him money. When the siblings’ own mother abandons them to… Keep Reading