“One of the best books of the year.”
—New York Post
Coming of age in the USSR in the 1980s, best friends Anya and Milka try to envision a free and joyful future for themselves. They spend their summers at Anya’s dacha just outside of Moscow, lazing in the apple orchard, listening to Queen songs, and fantasizing about trips abroad and the lives of American teenagers. Meanwhile, Anya’s parents talk about World War II, the Blockade, and the hardships they have endured.
By the time Anya and Milka are fifteen, the Soviet Empire is on the verge of collapse. They pair up with classmates Trifonov and Lopatin, and the four friends share secrets and desires, argue about history and politics, and discuss forbidden books. But the world is changing, and the fleeting time they have together is cut short by a sudden tragedy.
Years later, Anya returns to Russia from America, where she has chosen a different kind of life, far from her family and childhood friends. When she meets Lopatin again, he is a smug businessman who wants to buy her parents’ dacha and cut down the apple orchard. Haunted by the ghosts of her youth, Anya comes to the stark realization that memory does not fade or disappear; rather, it moves us across time, connecting our past to our future, joys to sorrows.
Inspired by Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s The Orchard powerfully captures the lives of four Soviet teenagers who are about to lose their country and one another, and who struggle to survive, to save their friendship, to recover all that has been left behind.
Order:
“Stunning debut... Gorcheva-Newberry pulls off a tragic and nostalgic love letter to a much-tried generation. This is a winner.” READ FULL REVIEW
—Publishers Weekly (Starred)
“…one system yields to another that ends up looking mighty similar to the one that came before, and with each upheaval comes a steep price that citizens are forced to pay. Gorcheva-Newberry beautifully renders these historical trends using Chekhov as a blueprint in this moving, tragic, and distinctly Russian tale.” READ FULL REVIEW
—Harvard Review
“Most of us who grew up in the United States during the Cold War had little insight into the lives of our Soviet peers, and it’s here that Gorcheva-Newberry does the reader a great service, offering a peek behind the Iron Curtain and its veil of propaganda." READ FULL REVIEW
—BookPage (Starred)
“An intensely evocative and gorgeously written coming-of-age story.” READ FULL REVIEW
—Minneapolis StarTribune (Starred)
“In Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry’s debut, it is the children of the Perestroika generation who offer lived stories of growth and survival despite a destabilized world.” READ FULL REVIEW
—Caitlin Stout, Chicago Review of Books
“A magnificent story about the desperate times of Generation Perestroika…. Rich with imagery….a tour de force….” READ FULL REVIEW
—Mark Zvonkovic, Midwest Book Review
“Every reader knows what it's like to lose a friend, but not everyone knows the loss of a nation. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry knows both. Her novel immerses us in the tense, passionate, bloody best friendship of two unforgettable young women in the last years of the Soviet state. It is aching and sexy, clear-eyed and heartbreaking, honest and necessary. You will devour it. The Orchard is an exquisite, explosive debut.”
—Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth
“Charming and tragic, hopeful and disillusioned, profoundly intimate and sensitive to history, The Orchard evokes Soviet perestroika in all its contradictions. With exquisite lyricism, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry recalls what it meant to grow up in Moscow in the 1980s, when both she and her nation were on the cusp of unknowable futures.”
—Ken Kalfus, author of Envy and 2 A.M. in Little America
“The Orchard is a beautiful portrayal of life lived in enormous change and upheaval, rooted in the history of a vast country. It is a novel worth of the master, Chekhov, whose great play we see echoed in it.”
—Richard Bausch, author of Peace
“A timeless tale of memory, desire, dreams lost and altered, love changed and unchanged.”
—Yiyun Lee, author of Must I Go
“In The Orchard, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry has given us a deeply personal coming-of-age story with the unapologetic sensuality and impressive scope of a Gabriel García Márquez novel . . . This is a sublime novel."
—Christine Sneed, author of The Virginity of Famous Men and Paris, He Said
“Beautiful novelistic debut…Gorcheva-Newberry is among the most subtle and evocative writers I have read in many years. This novel is a gem, and its author is a major new voice in contemporary fiction. This may be the first time you've heard of her. But it will not be the last."
—Steve Yarborough, author of The Unmade World
“The Orchard is extraordinary. Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry delivers an electrifying novel, brimming with passion, pathos, and searing insights into Russia's turbulent and richly-textured past. I literally didn't want the novel to end.”
—Jennifer Cody Epstein, author of Wunderland
“Snow, politics, orchards, love, death, guilt figure in the experience of best friends in their coming of age in the Russia of perestroika. The Orchard is a great pleasure, a novel that reminds us of that intense time of life when it all mattered.”
—Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood
“Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry exquisitely chronicles the pervasive losses and loves of her four unforgettable ‘perestroika generation’ characters. The Orchard is a fitting homage to the great Chekhov himself.”
—Cristina García, author of Here in Berlin and Dreaming in Cuban
