The Red Sofa

Anne has had no word from Gyl, a former lover whose replies have dried up and who has gone off to Siberia to build an ideal community by Lake Baikal rather than abandon the utopian hopes they once shared. She boards the Trans-Siberian toward Irkutsk to find him. On the long, slow journey she shares compartments with passing strangers, watches the endless landscape, reads, and recalls Gyl and the other men she has loved and left. Her mind keeps returning to Paris and Clémence Barrot, an elderly neighbour and former milliner whose memory is failing, who rarely leaves her flat and waits for her, seated on a red couch. Anne used to read aloud to her the lives of rebellious women such as Olympe de Gouges and Milena Jesenská, and the two became close through those stories and the memories they swapped.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

148 pages in the original

Genres

Love (assigned by AI)

Set in

Russia, France

First published

2007 by Sabine Wespieser

Author's age

68 when first published

ISBN

9782848050546 (original)

9780857428769 (Seagull Books, India)