Pravda

Book excerpt: Dark family secrets come to light in this novel of “nearly Dickensian proportions” set in Paris, New York, and St. Petersburg (The New Yorker). Thirty-two-year-old Gabriel Glover arrives in St. Petersburg from London to find his Russian mother dead in her apartment. Reeling from grief, Gabriel and his twin sister, Isabella, arrange the funeral—without contacting their manipulative and self-indulgent father, who is off living his own decadent life in France. But unbeknownst to the twins, there is another family member out there. Their mother long ago abandoned a son, Arkady. Now he has grown into a pitiless predator, and is determined to claim his birthright. Aided by an ex-seminarian whose heroin addiction is destroying him, Arkady sets out to find the siblings and reveal the dark secret hidden from them their entire lives. Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Pravda is a darkly funny and compulsively readable novel about love, loss, and the destructive legacy of deceit from the acclaimed author of Let Go My Hand. “A novel so vivid it glows in the dark—like truth.” —The Washington Post