Europa

As a teenager Nikita escaped from Moscow to Paris. Now in middle age, tired and overweight, he stands on a borrowed balcony in Nice, facing the winter sea, and thinks about Nina, his only friend. In his gloomy exile's mind, different times run together and memory works like a city map, spread over Paris, Brussels, Nice and Moscow. The dream of a free, cosmopolitan Europe cracks slowly while the city of his childhood begins to glow with an unreal attraction. Both a meditation on rootlessness and an exile's tale, it settles accounts with nostalgia and tells a century of Russian emigration, with Nina, misanthrope, compulsive writer and failed terrorist, at its homeless core.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

444 pages in the original

Genres

Migration (assigned by AI)

Set in

France, Belgium, Russia

First published

2021 by Albert Bonniers Förlag

Author's age

41 when first published

ISBN

9789100183967 (original)