Elias Almeida, professional revolutionary, has seen mankind at its pitiless worst. Witness as a child to the death of both his parents in uprisings in Angola and the Congo, and later as a Soviet agent at the heart of African politics, he has observed murder, rape, pillage and starvation in the name of ideology, and suffered imprisonment and torture. Yet he continues to believe in a better world and the redeeming power of love - the love of humanity, and the love between individuals. And in his own case, the love of one woman, a Russian who rescued him from thugs one snowy night on the streets of Moscow ...Spanning forty years of Africa's tormented past as a battleground between East and West and ranging fromCuba toSiberia, this powerful, impassioned novel plumbs the depths of human nature, but shows the heights men and women are capable of reaching too.

Author Biography

Andrei Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1957, but has lived in France since 1987. While initially sleeping rough in Paris he wrote his first novel, A HERO'S DAUGHTER, which was eventually published in 1990 after Makine had to pretend it had been translated from the Russian. With his fourth novel, LE TESTAMENT FRANCAIS, he became the first author to win both of France's top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and Prix Medicis. It has gone on to sell over a million copies and be translated into 28 languages. Since then Andrei Makine has written five novels, including A LIFE'S MUSIC, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire.