Was it a life complete? Does such a life ever really exist? Life is, after all, full of trade-offs and choices. Caldwell (for that is the only name by which we know her) has died. Compelling and complex, Forty Rooms is also profoundly affecting, its ending shattering but true. What follows are the decades of births and deaths, the celebrations, material accumulations, and home comforts until one day, her children grown and gone, her husband absent, she finds herself alone except for the ghosts of her youth, who have come back to haunt and even taunt her.

(He is also a great cook.) They drift into an affair and marriage. He is sure of his path through life, and he is protective of her. But one day she runs into a college classmate. But her hunger for adventure and her longing to be a great poet conspire to kill the affair. We follow this child as she reaches adolescence, leaves home to study in America, and slowly discovers sexual happiness and love. For our protagonist, the much-loved child of a late marriage, the first rooms she is aware of as she nears the age of five are those that make up her family s Moscow apartment. They form her biography, from childhood to death. Forty rooms is a conceit: it proposes that a modern woman will inhabit forty rooms in her lifetime. Olga Grushin is dealing with issues of women s identity, of women s choices, that no modern novel has explored so deeply. Totally original in conception and magnificently executed, Forty Rooms is mysterious, withholding, and ultimately emotionally devastating. 1 Forty Rooms By Olga Grushin Forty Rooms By Olga Grushin The internationally acclaimed author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov now returns to gift us with Forty Rooms, which outshines even that prizewinning novel.

Forty Rooms by Olga Grushin