the rich political milieu of the former Soviet Union sets this book apart. Her tidy, witty descriptions of characters keep the book moving along at a good clip. An engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.' - Bookpage, 'Gorokhova is a lush and beautiful writer. Her story of oppression and hope is described in distinctive poetical prose.' - Marie Claire (UK), 'Extraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail. An engrossing portrait of a very lively, intelligent girl coming of emotional and intellectual age in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union.â€� Bookpage, 'An exquisitely moving memoir detailing Gorokhova's experiences of growing up behind the Iron Curtain. Marvelous reminiscence.' -Ben Dickinson, Elle, â€œExtraordinarily rich in sensory and emotional detail. Her memoir is proof that the human spirit can triumph even in the most repressive of times.' - Edward Hower, author ofThe New Life HotelandThe Storms of May, ' A Mountain of Crumbs vividly, devastatingly conveys what it was like growing up in the shabby disillusion of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union-and also swooningly indulges the nostalgia for place and landscape that's seemingly steeped into every Russian soul. Marvelous reminiscence.' -Ben Dickinson, Elle, 'Elena Gorokhova has written an endearing, sensitive story of her early years in the USSR. 'A Mountain of Crumbs vividly, devastatingly conveys what it was like growing up in the shabby disillusion of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union-and also swooningly indulges the nostalgia for place and landscape that's seemingly steeped into every Russian soul.

It is an elegy to the lost country of childhood, where those who leave can never return. Through Elena's captivating voice, we learn not only the stories of Russian family life in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose curiosity and determination finally transport her to a new world. In the battle between a strong-willed daughter and her authoritarian mother, the daughter, in the end, must break free and leave in order to survive. Elena is controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, a mirror image of her motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. Born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, Elena finds her passion in the complexity of the English language-but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s such a passion verges on the subversive.

Elena's country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride. Elena Gorokhova's A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a Soviet girl who discovers the truths adults are hiding from her and the lies her homeland lives by.

A mountain of crumbs