"The Russian Concubine" dazzled readers. Now, its gifted author delivers another sweeping historical novel. Davinsky Labor Camp, Siberia, 1933: Only two things in this wretched place keep Sofia from giving up hope: the prospect of freedom, and the stories told by her friend and fellow prisoner Anna, of a charmed childhood in Petrograd, and her fervent girlhood love for a passionate revolutionary named Vasily. After a perilous escape, Sofia endures months of desolation and hardship. But, clinging to a promise she made to Anna, she subsists on the belief that someday she will track down Vasily. In a remote village, sheas nursed back to health by a Gypsy family, and there she finds more than refugeashe also finds Mikhail Pashin, who, her heart tells her, is Vasily in disguise. Heas everything she has ever wantedabut he belongs to Anna. After coming this far, Sofia is tantalizingly close to freedom, familyaeven a future. All that stands in her way is the secret past that could endanger everything she has come to hold deara]