The Girl from the Hermitage

'A beautifully written book that takes you right into the characters' world. Highly recommended' - Lucinda Hawksley, 'The best historical fiction helps us walk through history alongside ordinary people and that's what The Girl from the Hermitage achieves with deceptive ease. Molly Garland's evocation of Russian life in all its contrasting stages is always utterly convincing and frequently affecting. It's a terrific debut' - Liz Trenow, 'A captivating and richly imagined portrait of love, life and survival' - Caroline Ambrose, founder, Bath Novel Award

Galina was born into a world of horrors. So why does she mourn its passing? From her childhood in the siege of Leningrad to her old age amid the glitz of modern St Petersburg, The Girl from the Hermitage is a portrait of the evolution from the Soviet Union to present-day Russia told seen through one woman's eyesIt is December 1941, and eight-year-old Galina and her friend Vera are caught in the siege of Leningrad, eating wallpaper soup and dead rats. Galina's artist father Mikhail has been kept away from the front to help save the treasures of the Hermitage. Its cellars could provide a safe haven, as long as Mikhail can survive the perils of a commission from one of Stalin's colonels. Three decades on, Galina is a teacher at the Leningrad Art Institute. What ought to be a celebratory weekend at her forest dacha turns sour when she makes an unwelcome discovery. The painting she starts that day will hold a grim significance for the rest of her life, as the old Soviet Union makes way for the new Russia and her world changes out of all recognition. Warm, wise and utterly enthralling, Molly Gartland's debut novel guides us from the old communist era, with its obvious terrors and its more surprising comforts, into the bling of 21st-century St Petersburg. Galina's story is an insightful meditation on ageing and nostalgia as well as a compelling page-turner.