Kolkhoz

Standing among the mourners gathered to honour Hélene Carrere d`Encausse - renowned historian of Russia, member of the Académie Française, national figure - her son, Emmanuel Carrere, wonders who this formidable woman was: to the country, to history and to himself. In Kolkhoz, Carrere turns his unflinching gaze on his own lineage, crafting his most intimate and ambitious book yet. Spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, and up to the war in Ukraine, he traces the destinies of a family scattered by revolution, ideology and pride. There are White Russian ancestors clinging to vanished grandeur; relatives lured back to Stalin`s USSR and swallowed by silence; a father obsessed with genealogy and lost nobility; and, at the centre, a mother whose brilliance, ambition and dominance shaped both French intellectual life and her son`s inner world. As Carrere sifts through letters, archives and contested memories, he confronts the stories families tell to survive and the lies they tell to protect one another and asks: how do political faith and historical catastrophe reverberate across generations? And can a son write about his mother with honesty without betraying her? At once sweeping and surgical, tender and unsparing, Kolkhoz is a family epic and a reckoning: a meditation on communism and its afterlives, on filial piety and rebellion, and on the uneasy border between truth and love. WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDICIS PRAISE FOR EMMANUEL CARR+RE `A superstar writer` Guardian `One of the best storytellers around` Evening Standard `The most exciting living writer` Karl Ove Knausgaard Read