"A woman growing up in a family of Russian immigrants in the 1910s seeks a thoroughly American life. Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents, who left two older daughters behind to build a life in a Pennsylvania Appalachian town. This town, in the first decades of the 20th century, is filled with Russian transplants and a new church with a dome. Here, boys quit grade school for the coal mines and girls are married...

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Eighty-two-year-old Marina Buriakov, preparing for her granddaughter's wedding in Seattle, finds it more and more difficult to hold onto memories in the present, retreating often to the 1940s when, living in the basement of the Hermitage Museum with other employees during the German siege of Leningrad, she created a memory room in her mind furnished with the museum's priceless masterpieces.

"The little-known story of a spy on the atom-bomb project in World War II who had top security clearance--American born, Soviet trained, he was never even suspected until after his information was in Soviet hands and he was safe in the USSR. It's LeCarre and "The Americans" for real"-- Provided by publisher. In 1932 George Koval's parents, Russian Jews who had emigrated because of anti-Semitism, decided to return home to live out their socialist...