Berberova’s wonderful novel about three love affairs… Like Turgenev and Chekhov, of whom she is the rightful heir, is uncannily shrewd about romance, about its bright promise, without making her characters’ real satisfaction seem trite.

New York Review of Books

Cape of Storms

by Nina Berberova

Translated from Russian by Marian Schwartz

In Cape of Storms, Nina Berberova portrays a very specific generation––one born in Russia, displaced by the Revolution, and trying to adapt to a new home, Paris. Three sisters––Dasha, Sonia, and Zai––share the same father, Tiagen, an attractive, weak-willed, womanizing White Russian, but each thinks differently about her inner world of beliefs and aspirations, and consequently each follows a different path. Dasha marries and leaves for a bourgeois expatriate life in colonial Africa. Zai, the youngest, and an appealing adolescent, flirts with becoming an actress or a poet. Sonia, the middle daughter, completes a university degree but falls victim to a shocking tragedy. Cape of Storms is a shattering book that opens with a hair-raising scene in which Dasha witnesses her mother’s murder at the hands of Bolshevik thugs, and ends with the Blitzkrieg sweeping toward Paris. It is unparalleled in Berberova’s work for its many shifts of mood and viewpoint and secures the author’s place as “Chekhov’s most vital inheritor” (Boston Review).

Paperback(published Nov, 01 1999)

ISBN
9780811217651

Clothbound(published Nov, 01 1999)

ISBN
9780811214162
Price US
26.95
Portrait of Nina Berberova

Nina Berberova

20th century Russian immigrant novelist and short story writer who settled in Paris

Berberova’s wonderful novel about three love affairs… Like Turgenev and Chekhov, of whom she is the rightful heir, is uncannily shrewd about romance, about its bright promise, without making her characters’ real satisfaction seem trite.

New York Review of Books