Snowdrops

Description

Snowdrops. That's what the Russians call them - the bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just give up and lie down into the whiteness, and murder victims hidden in the drifts by their killers. Nick has a confession. When he worked as a high-flying British lawyer in Moscow, he was seduced by Masha, an enigmatic woman who led him through her city: the electric nightclubs and intimate dachas, the human kindnesses and state-wide corruption. Yet as Nick fell for Masha, he found that he fell away from himself; he knew that she was dangerous, but life in Russia was addictive, and it was too easy to bury secrets - and corpses - in the winter snows.

Born in London in 1974, Andrew Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton. He worked as a television producer before joining the The Economist. From 2004 to 2007 he was the magazine's Moscow correspondent, travelling widely across Russia and the former Soviet Union. He is the author of the acclaimed family history The Earl of Petticoat Lane (Heinemann, 2006). Snowdrops is his first novel. He lives in London with his wife and daughters.

"Snowdrops assaults all your senses with its power and poetry, and leaves you stunned and addicted" Independent, "A superlative portrait... Snowdrops displays a worldly confidence reminiscent of Robert Harris at his best" Financial Times, "Reads like Graham Greene on steroids... Miller's complex, gripping debut novel is undoubtedly the real thing" Daily Mail, "Miller brilliantly showcases Moscow as his novel's strutting, charismatic star... disturbing and dazzling" Sunday Telegraph, "Tight, compelling... A totally gripping first novel" The Times, "A tremendously assured, cool, complex, slow-burn of a novel and a bleak and superbly atmospheric portrait of modern Russia" William Boyd, "Superbly atmospheric...Elegantly written, and spot on its detail" Observer, "A chilling first novel about the slide from relative innocence into amorality. I love the honesty of the writing, and the way the furious cold of a bitter Moscow winter gradually emerges as a character in its own right" Julie Myerson, "Intoxicating... It will whirl you off your feet and set your moral compass spinning... A.D. Miller's sophisticated and many-layered debut novel skewers the relationship between victim and abuser, self-delusion and corruption, love and moral freefall" Spectator