Once Upon the River Love

First edition in English. 8vo. Pp. viii, 209. Quarter-bound tan cloth over maroon paper-covered boards, lettered in silver to spine; deckled fore-edges.

Signed by Author to title page.

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan. Originally published in 1994 by Éditions du Félin as Au temps du fleuve Amour.

Author's second novel and the first to be published in English. A Publishers Weekly Best Book for 1998. Three teenage boys in a 1970s Siberian settlement now on its last legs become enamoured with French films, matinée idol Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the idea of falling in love.

A Russian émigré in France since 1987, Makine had to present his first manuscripts as translations from his mother tongue to overcome publishers' scepticism over his near-faultless French as a newly arrived exile. The author grew up bilingual thanks to an elderly French nanny who took care of him since the age of four. Recipient of the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis for Dreams of My Russian Summers (1995), Makine was elected to the Académie française in March 2016, succeeding the late Assia Djebar.

"An accomplished, affecting work, psychologically complex, written in a lyrical, sparely impassioned prose that serves as a kind of magnifying glass on a fabulously exotic experience." –Richard Bernstein, New York Times