The memoir begins long before the beginning – as a child Sofia listened to her Grandmother’s stories for so long that “I became a skillful swimmer, familiar with every nook and cranny of grandma Asya’s memory bays.” So Sofia skips through time, and imagines she is the grandma as a girl, the year before the 1918 revolution.
It’s a brave and simple device, and so the novel starts off with warmly glowing ‘country childhood’ memories. Soon enough though, the glow dissipates, and the Grandma’s memories don’t stretch as far as the troubled times and escape to Grozny. “All that happened to them later in Grozny sounded obscure and vague.”

The story moves to the 1960s and then to the 80s. The frequent upheavals, forced moves to a new home, and constant dangers are described in the same manner another writer might narrate office hassles. This is an attractive, common-sense style which moves from personal romantic flings to a mention of the breakdown in civil society, back to children’s parties. This chick-lit approach, the reader may think, does not do justice to the gravity of the era. This focus on the domestic shows an ignorance of the broader forces shaping her life.

And then as though suddenly hearing the reader, the narrator breaks out of the story to make exactly those reflections the reader was missing. There is a subtle skill at work in contrasting the private sphere and the public sphere. We are in a world where personal values and friendships have more durability than empires. The narrator’s chattiness and innate decency will on occasion come across as pitifully fragile – as for example when she gets mugged, or a female friend of hers gets smeared with mud by a passing soldier, seemingly solely for looking so clean.

But Sofia has no natural inclination to nihilism or sense of absurdity. The power struggle involving presidents and generals may lack any sense, but her network of friends and family is an eminently sane world.

The book is something like a Maeve Binchy story set against a background of unpredictable violence and disintegration of order. It is a sheer joy to read, and an easy read. It pulls the reader in and you end up rooting for this woman who seems to shrug off the nightmare of history.
The insights into Chechnya and the tensions which festered and boiled over is an added extra, for those readers with an interest in Russia. Mainly it is a story of childhood, romance, and human bonds which endure in turbulent times.