"Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once said Russia is 'a country where poetry is respected—people are killed for reading it, for writing it.' Sadly, he was correct. He died in a Siberian gulag in 1938, one of millions of victims of Stalin's terror. Littell, best known for espionage novels, turns to historical fiction by telling Mandelstam's story through the eyes of the poet's wife, Nadezhda, and various others, including writers Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. Littell begins the story in 1934; Mandelstam is famous but impoverished because publishers are now afraid to release his work. His only powerful patron, Bukharin, has been banished from Stalin's inner circle. He assumes his arrest is imminent, and he writes 'The Stalin Epigram,' a 16-line poetic attack on the dictator's brutalities. There is an awful beauty to Mandelstam's story as Littell tells it. The characters are trapped in a country gone mad, yet they strive to maintain their humanity. Historically accurate and filled with period detail, this is both a tragic and life-affirming novel."—Booklist