Allison Epstein

"Saint Petersburg, 1812. Russian forces have defeated Napoleon at great cost, and the tsar's empire is once again at peace. Sasha, a captain in the Imperial Army, returns home to Grand Duke Felix, the disgraced second son of the tsar as well as his irrepressibly charming lover. However, their reunion is quickly interrupted by the arrival of Sofia, a mysteirously persuasive figure whose disruptive presence Sasha suspects to be something more than human. Felix, insisting that Sasha's old-fashioned superstitions are misplaced, takes Sofia into his confidence - a connection that quickly becomes both personal and political. On her incendiary advice, Felix confronts his father about the brutal conditions of the common people in the aftermath of the war, to disastrous results, separating him from Sasha and setting him on a collision course with a vocal group of dissidents: the Koalitsiya. Meanwhile, the Koalitsiya plan to gridlock Saint Petersberg with a city-wide strike in hopes of awakening the upper classes to the grim circumstances of the laboring people. Marya, a resourceful sometimes thief and trusted lieutenant of the Koalitsiya, also falls under Sofia's spell, and allied with Felix and her fellow revolutionaries, she finds herself in the middle of a battle she could never have predicted. As Sofia's influence grows and rising tensions threaten the tsar's peace, Sasha, Felix, and Marya are forced to choose between the ideals they hold close and the people they love. Allison Epstein combines cleverly constructed plot with unforgettable characters in this exhuberant historical page-turner, intercut with fractured retellings of traditional Eastern European folk stories that are equal parts deadly dark and slyly illuminating." -- Jacket flap