The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia

The prizewinning memoir of one of the worldâ€™s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the peopleÂ and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia
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Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotelâ€”the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towlesâ€”Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. InÂ The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivationâ€”of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer.Â As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringingâ€”of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of foodâ€”we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged.

â€œFrom heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanityâ€™s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.â€ â€”Anna Summers, from the Introduction

Country	USA
Brand	Random House Books for Young Readers
Manufacturer	Penguin Publishing Group
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	Illustrations, unspecified
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2017-02-07
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780143129974

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia

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