The Longest Winter

Russia, Christmas 1916, the eve of Revolution: dark-eyed, beautiful Evelyn Markham has arrived from England to stay in Petrograd with her cousins, the Suvarovs. Outwardly aloof, inwardly desperately vulnerable, Evelyn is tormented by Petrograd society's hedonistic disregard of the great war that is destroying Europe and by the memory of her fiance John, missing in the trenches. Aware of the tensions seething beneath the opulence of her new life, Evelyn is disturbed by the political squabbles of her student cousins Piotr and Georgii, and particularly fears the revolutionary activites she thinks are encouraged by their disagreeable friend Bob Adamson, an American journalist. Only their handsome cousing, Segei Voroshilov, on leave from the front, seems to comprehend her pain.Then Revolution comes, and life can never be the same again. As chaos overwhelms Petrograd, the Suvarovs are forced to flee to Shenkursk, near Archangel in the frozen, twilit north. There, in the bitter turmoil of civil war, Evelyn is faced with the grim reality of suffering as she nurses the tropps; forced to shake off convention, she begins to question her values...and her judgement of the people around her.