How one family endured the horrors of Russian history

The price of a car

The Shoemaker and His Daughter. By Conor O’Clery. Doubleday Ireland; 384 pages; £14.99.

RUSSIA demands to be written about. Journalists posted to Frankfurt or Brussels rarely take a year off to tell the country’s back-story over 350 pages, but Moscow correspondents find the prospect hard to resist. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times is the latest to grapple with Russia’s tumultuous recent past, but he does it in an unusual way. “The Shoemaker and His Daughter” is the story of his wife’s relatives, and how they survived the savagery of the Russian 20th century—the wars, the reforms, the crashes, the revolutions.

Mr O’Clery is not the first person to recount Russia’s history through the microcosm of individual lives, but his unique access to his in-laws gives him material other writers have lacked, which in turn fills his book with a warmth and generosity that are...

from The Economist: Books and arts https://ift.tt/2Mq5gNP