Kolkhoz - Emmanuel Carrere

A personal history of war, obsession, love and truth by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of The AdversaryStanding among the mourners gathered to honour H�l�ne Carr�re d'Encausse - renowned historian of Russia, member of the Acad�mie Fran�aise, national figure - her son, Emmanuel Carr�re, wonders who this formidable woman was: to the country, to history and to himself. In Kolkhoz, Carr�re turns his unflinching gaze on his own lineage, crafting his most intimate and ambitious book yet. Spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, and up to the war in Ukraine, he traces the destinies of a family scattered by revolution, ideology and pride. There are White Russian ancestors clinging to vanished grandeur; relatives lured back to Stalin's USSR and swallowed by silence; a father obsessed with genealogy and lost nobility; and, at the centre, a mother whose brilliance, ambition and dominance shaped both French intellectual life and her son's inner world. As Carr�re sifts through letters, archives and contested memories, he confronts the stories families tell to survive and the lies they tell to protect one another and asks: how do political faith and historical catastrophe reverberate across generations? And can a son write about his mother with honesty without betraying her? At once sweeping and surgical, tender and unsparing, Kolkhoz is a family epic and a reckoning: a meditation on communism and its afterlives, on filial piety and rebellion, and on the uneasy border between truth and love. WINNER OF THE PRIX M�DICISPRAISE FOR EMMANUEL CARRERE'A superstar writer' Guardian
'One of the best storytellers around' Evening Standard
'The most exciting living writer' Karl Ove Knausgaard