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Summer time 1978. Brezhnev sits like a stone in the Kremlin, Israel and Egypt are inching towards peace, and in the bustling, polyglot avenues of Rome, weird new creatures have came out: Soviet Jews who've escaped to freedom through a split in the Flat iron Curtain. Among the thousands who've landed in Italy to secure visas for new lives in the Western world are the customers of the Krasnansky family - three generations of Russian Jews. There exists Samuil, an old Communist and Red Military veteran, who reluctantly leaves the country to which he has dedicated himself body and heart and soul; Karl, his elder son, a man eager to embrace the opportunities emigration affords; Alec, his younger son, a carefree playboy for whom life is definitely a game; and Polina, Alec's new better half, that has risked the most by breaking with her old family to join this new one. Together, they'll spend half a year in Rome - their way station and purgatory. They will immerse themselves in the carnival of emigration, within an Italy rife with love affairs and ruthless hustles, with dislocation and nostalgia, with the assurance and peril of a much better life. Through the unforgettable Krasnansky family, David Bezmozgis has generated an intimate portrait of a tumultuous time. Written in precise, musical prose, The Free World is a sensational debut book, a heartfelt multigenerational saga of great historical range and even greater human being debth. Enlarging on the themes or templates of aspiration and exile that infused his critically acclaimed first collection, Natasha and Other Testimonies, The Free World establishes Bezmozgis as one of your most adult and completed storytellers.
