The woman who waited - Andrew Makine

By a master of European literature, a sensual, absorbing tale of the human capacity for enduring love, selfish passion and cowardly betrayal.

In a hamlet amid the austere beauty of northern Russia lives the woman who waited, still expecting her lover to return from the Second World War after thirty years. A young, rebellious writer from Leningrad, fascinated by her fruitless fidelity, seeks to unravel her secrets - but the closer he comes to her, the more she surprises him.

*Makine's reputation rises with every book, and some have claimed that he deserves the Nobel Prize; on the strength of this teasing, emotionally dense novel, it's casy to see why?

Matt Thorne, Sunday Telegraph

'Luminous, enthralling Hugh MacDonald, Herald

'A work about love and its doppelganger, infatuation, which is by turns touching and profoundly sad' Simon Baker, Spectator Makine is masterly at evoking the dazzling, desolate, ice-and-snow landscapes Francis King, Literary Review

Andrei Makine was born in Siberia in 1957, but has lived in France since 1987. He is the author of ten novels, including Le Testament Français, which won both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis and has been published in translation in twenty-nine countries.