Download The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing up in Communist Russia AudioBook Free
The prize-winning memoir of 1 of the world's great writers, about coming of age and finding her speech amid the hardships of Stalinist Russia. Born next door from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel - the setting up of the New York Times best-selling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles - Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was raised in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were low in the wake of the Russian Revolution to longing in loaf of bread lines. In The Woman from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation - of wandering the pavements like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive body far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated copy writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing - of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight vehicles and beneath the dining dining tables of communal apartments rentals, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food - we see, in her amazing lack of self-pity, her feral instinct and the crucible where her gift idea for giving speech to a region of survivors was forged. "From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical bill of the toughest childhood and junior imaginable.... It [belongs] alongside the classic reviews of humanity's much loved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield.... The child is irresistible therefore is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her storage." (Anna Summers, from the advantages)
