The first English translation of a pioneering Russian writer: a hypnotically dark classic of love, deceit and wayward youth in Paris

Disaffected and restless, teenage siblings Liza and Nikolai are left to their own devices in Biarritz by their distant mother. When an English boy, Cromwell, sees Liza alone on a beach, he imagines she is the romantic beauty Isolde. Infatuated, he falls in with their group of Russian émigrés, introducing them to the escapist pleasures of nightlife, of champagne dinners and dancing in jazz bars.

Initially dazzled, Liza feels a growing sense of isolation and anxiety as the youths’ world closes in on itself and their darker drives begin to stir. Haunted by feverish memories of Russia, she plots to return to the homeland she hardly remembers.

Deemed scandalous on first publication for its unflinching depiction of nascent sexuality and wayward adolescence, Isolde is a startlingly fresh, disturbing portrait of a lost generation of Russian exiles, now in English for the first time.

Irina Odoevtseva was a Russian novelist, poet, translator and memoirist. Born in 1895 in Riga, she fled Russia in 1922 and, after a brief period in Berlin, settled in Paris with her husband Georgy Ivanov. There Odoevtseva published short fiction and several successful novels. Later, she had great success with her memoirs On the Banks of the Neva (1967) and On the Banks of the Seine (1983). She returned to Russia in 1987 at the age of ninety-one to a rapturous reception.

Bryan Karetnyk

Book translations