Daughters of Victory
A Novel
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Last Checkmate comes a brilliant novel spanning from the Russian Revolution to the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Union and following two unforgettable women…their fates intertwined by ties of family and interrupted by the tragedy of war. Perfect for readers of Kate Quinn, Pam Jenoff, and Elena Gorokhova.
Russia 1917: Beautiful, educated Svetlana Petrova defied her stifling aristocratic family to join a revolution promising freedom. Now, released after years of imprisonment, she discovers her socialist party vying for power against the dictatorial Bolsheviks and her beloved uncle, a champion of her cause, was murdered by a mysterious assassin named Orlova. Her signature? Blinding her victims before she kills them. Svetlana resolves to avenge his death by destroying this vicious opponent, even as she longs to reunite with the daughter she has not seen in years.
USSR 1941: Now living in obscurity in a remote village, Svetlana opens her home to Mila Rozovskaya, the eighteen-year-old granddaughter from Leningrad she has never met. She hopes to protect Mila from the oncoming Nazi invasion, but when the enemy occupies the village, Svetlana sees the young woman fall under the spell of the resistance—echoing her once-passionate idealism. As Mila takes up her fight, dangerous secrets and old enemies soon threaten all Svetlana holds dear. To protect her family, she must confront her long-buried past—yet if the truth emerges victorious, it holds the power to save or shatter them. A risk Svetlana has no choice but to take.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A former aristocrat who embraced the uprising in 1905 Russia shepherds her granddaughter through similar difficult choices during the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in the engrossing latest from Saab (after The Last Checkmate). Svetlana Petrova joins her uncle Misha in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, leaving her noble family behind. After 10 years in a czarist prison, she travels to Moscow, where she learns Misha was assassinated during the 1917 revolution and reunites with Kazimir Grigoryevich, her former lover and the father of her daughter, Tatiana, whom she left at a church in Kiev. Though Kazimir suspects Svetlana is a bourgeois infiltrator, she remains determined to aid his anti-Bolshevik efforts with the Socialist Revolutionary Party. Fast forward to 1941 U.S.S.R. where Svetlana, now blind, lives in a remote village in the Vitebsk region. Though Tatiana now despises her, believing Svetlana abandoned her to continue her fight within the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Svetlana agrees to have Tatiana's daughter, Mila, stay with her as the German army approaches. While seeking to keep Mila out of harm's way, Svetlana eventually realizes that the survival of her granddaughter may require her to face secrets from her past. Saab brings a magnetic authenticity to the proceedings as her richly drawn characters make life and death decisions. Historical fiction fans will be riveted.
