The Shoemaker and his Daughter

Author: OClery, Conor

Former Soviet Union, USSR (Europe)

Published on 14 March 2019 by Transworld Publishers Ltd (Black Swan) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 384 pages
129 x 197 x 24 | 272g

WINNER OF THE 2020 MICHEL DÉON PRIZEOClery takes us into the hidden heart of Soviet Russia... An arresting and evocative story Keggie Carew, author of DadlandA tour de force ... Love, politics, murder, wars, and the fracturing of ties, personal and ethnic. OClery is a gifted writer Luke Harding, bestselling author of CollusionThe Soviet Union, 1962. Gifted shoemaker Stanislav Suvorov is imprisoned for five years. His crime? Selling his car for a profit. On his release, social shame drives him and his family into voluntary exile in Siberia, 5,000 kilometres from home. In a climate thats unfriendly both geographically and politically, its their chance to start again. The Shoemaker and His Daughter is an epic story spanning the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, taking in eighty years of Soviet and Russian history, from Stalin to Putin. Following the footsteps of a remarkable family Conor OClery knows well - he is married to the shoemakers daughter - its both a compelling insight into life in a secretive world at a siesmic moment in time and a powerful tale of ordinary lives shaped by extraordinary times.