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by Julie Himes
A love triangle involving Mikhail Bulgakov, famed author of The Master and Margarita, an agent of Stalin's secret police, and the bewitching Margarita has inescapable consequences for all three in 1930s Russia.
It is 1933 and Mikhail Bulgakov's enviable career is on the brink of being dismantled. His friend and mentor, the poet Osip Mandelstam, has been arrested, tortured, and sent into exile. Meanwhile, a mysterious agent of the secret police has developed a growing obsession with exposing Bulgakov as an enemy of the state. To make matters worse, Bulgakov has fallen in love with the dangerously outspoken Margarita. Facing imminent arrest, infatuated with Margarita, he is inspired to write his masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, a satirical novel that is scathingly critical of power and the powerful.
Ranging between lively readings in the homes of Moscow's literary elite to the Siberian Gulag, Mikhail and Margarita recounts a passionate love triangle while painting a portrait of a country with a towering literary tradition confronting a dictatorship that does not tolerate dissent. Margarita is a strong, idealistic woman, who is fiercely loved by two very different men, both of whom will fail in their attempts to shield her from the machinations of a regime hungry for human sacrifice. Himes launches a rousing defense of art and the artist during a time of systematic deception and she movingly portrays the ineluctable consequences of love for one of history's most enigmatic literary figures.
"Starred Review. Himes's confident, carefully crafted debut novel...adeptly details brutality and betrayal as well as creativity and the uncertainties of censorship..." - Publishers Weekly
"Drawing inspiration from Bulgakov's novel, The Master and Margarita, unpublished in his lifetime, Himes pens a whirlwind tale of romance and intrigue that approximates, if not exceeds, the talents of one of Russia's most heralded authors." - Library Journal
"Despite vivid prose, Himes' debut seems to wander aimlessly, unconvincing and bleak." - Kirkus
"An atmospheric, gripping, authoritative and deeply suspenseful narrative that utterly transports the reader." - Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Mercury
"Mikhail and Maragrita renders with astonishing authority and grace not only the oppressive monstrousness of the Soviet Regime...but also the intensity and beauty of the love at the novel's center, a love that's all the more heartening because it's generated by figures with such spectacular flaws." - Jim Shepard, national Book Award nominated author of The Book of Aron
This information about Mikhail and Margarita was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Julie Lekstrom Himes' short fiction has been published in Shenandoah, The Florida Review (Editor's Choice Award 2008), Fourteen Hills (nominated for Best American Mysteries 2011), and elsewhere. Mikhail and Margarita is her debut novel. She lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.
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