{"product_id":"girl-from-the-metropol-hotel-growing-up-in-communist-russia","title":"Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia","description":"\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age \u003cb\u003eas an enemy of the people \u003c\/b\u003eand finding her voice in Stalinist Russia \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel--the setting of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling novel \u003ci\u003eA Gentleman in Moscow \u003c\/i\u003eby Amor Towles--Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In \u003ci\u003eThe Girl from the Metropol Hotel\u003c\/i\u003e, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation--of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food--we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\"From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity's beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.\" --\u003cb\u003eAnna Summers, from the Introduction\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"Anna Summers, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Anna Summers","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":46793569894636,"sku":"9780143129974","price":20.27,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0684\/1791\/3068\/files\/9780143129974.jpg?v=1757015974","url":"https:\/\/intl.allstora.com\/products\/girl-from-the-metropol-hotel-growing-up-in-communist-russia","provider":"Allstora","version":"1.0","type":"link"}