-
Access our Top 20
Books of 2024!
Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Olga Grushin: GREW-shin
Olga Grushin is a Russian-born award-winning writer whose work has been translated into fifteen languages. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction and for England's Orange Award for New Writers. The New York Times chose it as a Notable Book of the Year, and both it and her second novel, The Line, were among The Washington Post's Ten Best Books of the Year (2007, 2010). In 2007, Granta named Grushin one of the Best Young American Novelists. Forty Rooms is her third novel. Grushin was born in Moscow, moved to the United States as a teenager, and now lives outside Washington, D.C., with her two children.
Olga Grushin's website
This bio was last updated on 03/02/2016. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
What is your novel, Forty Rooms, about?
My novel is about many things – art, inspiration, motherhood, living spaces that contain and define us – but at its heart, it's a book about choices. It tells a story of one woman who struggles to choose between following a path that is ordinary but may lead to happiness or a path that is uncommon and will lead into the unknown. The story is told in forty chronological episodes, each set in a different room of her life, from the cramped bathroom of her childhood apartment in Russia to the stately entrance hall of her last home in America. And every episode – every room – contains a choice she must make. Some choices are momentous – whether to go abroad or remain at home, whether to leave a lover or stay with him, whether to get married, whether to have a child; she knows as she makes them that they will alter the direction of her life. Others seem small, and their implications become apparent only years later, when she can barely recall how and when it was that everything changed, and she wonders if it would have been different if only she'd paid more attention. Over time, my character undergoes a deep internal transformation from the nameless dreamy, hungry ...
Nickolas Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is the author of the ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Forty Rooms
Try:
Shotgun Lovesongs
by Nickolas Butler
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Forty Rooms
Try:
The Blazing World
by Siri Hustvedt
We recommend 5 similar authors
.png)
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
