A Terrible Country, by Keith Gessen

A Terrible Country is the first novel in ten years from n+1 founding editor Keith Gessen. Faced with dismal academic job prospects and a withering personal life, Andrei leaves New York to spend the summer in Moscow to care for his elderly grandmother (and to collect her tales of Stalinist Russia—a research topic that might finally get him a job). But when Andrei arrives, he finds his grandmother’s dementia is worse than he expected. He learns to navigate Putin’s Moscow, still the city of his birth, where everything is too expensive. When he becomes entangled with a group of leftists, Andrei’s politics and his allegiances are tested, and he’s forced to come to terms with the Russian society he was born into and the American one he has enjoyed. Praise for A Terrible Country “This earnest and wistful but serious book gets good, and then it gets very good. Gessen finds an emotional tone for his material. He writes incisively about many things here but especially about, as the old saw h