by RonanBennett (Author)
Where magnificence and squalor co-exist, there will always be envy, rage, cruelty, paranoia and violence St Petersburg, 1914: imposing and shabby, monumental and squalid, and - under its surface of frosty glamour - seething with plots and secret allegiances. On a blustery April day O.V. Gulko, a respected newspaper editor, is murdered in front of a shocked crowd. Five days later Dr Otto Spethmann, famous psychoanalyst, receives a visit from the police. There has been another murder in the city - and somehow he is implicated. He is mystified - and deeply worried, as much for his young, spirited daughter as for himself. He is preoccupied, too, by two new patients: Anna Petrovna, the society beauty plagued with nightmares with whom he is steadily and inappropriately falling in love, and troubled genius Rozental, the brilliant but mentally fragile chess master, due to play the most important competition of his life - the spectacular St Petersburg chess tournament - but on the verge of a complete breakdown. With the city rife with speculation and alarm, Spethmann broods over his own chessboard, its pieces frozen mid-battle, and contemplates the many forces - political, historical, sexual - that are holding him in their grasp
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Edition: Export ed
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 03 Sep 2007
ISBN 10: 0747587310
ISBN 13: 9780747587316
Book Overview: An extremely commercial new direction for Ronan Sensational serialisation of the novel, as it is being written, in the Observer every week Eye-catching press advertising; chapter samplers available
Prizes: Shortlisted for Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award 2008.