Product Description

A Richard & Judy Book Club Selection

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Daily Mail
'Two strikingly different tales of love and grief are gradually revealed to have more in common than just the tenactiy of both men to cling desperately to the memory of love...a lush, romantic novel'

Sunday Express
'Really is as special as its press suggests...beautifully told...an amazingly assured debut'

Publishing News
'A tour de force ... mesmerizing'

Customer Reviews

you NEED to read this book!!!
This book was not one that I would of chosen for myself, it was chosen for me as a present, which I tried to appear thankful for, believing that it would not be the type of book I would want to read.

I was wrong! This is exactly the type of book that I feel everyone NEEDS to read. It tells of how love can drive people on to perform miracles. How losing love can make us despair and look for it in the most unlikely of places. And how after someone has left us we can move on with our lives, and become better people simply because we had that one perfect influence in our lives.

This book is inspiring to read, it can encourage us to make the most of every moment in time. The content in the book is perhaps not as important as the lessons that can be learned from it, we seldom appreciate the real positive influences in our lives, and take the world for granted. This book tells us of people who did just that, and how hard, yet rewarding it was when they overcame various obstacles.

I am not going to say too much about the story itself, as this is covered in detail by many over reviews on here. But I will say that the author of this book is a very clever man, who has obviously put a lot of time and energy into writing this masterpiece. This is a seamless story, which is so clever, and at the end helps you truly appreciate what life is all about, loving someone, and being loved in return.

I was also surprised to know that the author of this book writes from the experiences of his grandfather who escaped a POW camp to find his true love. To share in this experience is a real delight!

Random notes on rather doubtful love
To tell the truth, it's been awhile I wanted to share my opinion on this, but was totally unable to "count" the stars. It's definitely not a one-star book, I think, but sometimes it scarcely rises above two, sometimes it almost reaches five, though. So my four stars is not a very credible evaluation.

Sorry, I can't give an exact quotation of some previous reviewer, but there's a very important point: real life tragedies are not necessarily plausible in a book (like breathtaking real life adventures can be totally boring in a novel). I do my best, but I can't shake off the impression, that the author, losing his own sweetheart years and years ago, remembers her as some kind of idol, hence this ideal love, Leo and Eleni. But, sorry, this flawless love is incredible, uninteresting and sparks zero emotions in a flawed reader like me (I almost switched to Romeo and Juliet......) And when a young man is crying non-stop for the first 20 pages, you feel kind of drowned, wanting to breathe, not to read.

It gets much better with the second storyline, as you can really make an idol of a girl, when you are at war, when you are suffering and separated from her by thousands of kilometers. And the description of Siberian reality in WWI times is credible, something, that does not happen very often to Western writers.

Sadly, but Leo of 1992 is no character at all. I do my best to think what kind of person he is, I try to imagine this man living and breathing. Hmmm....... Puff of empty air. Ah, there's Roberto, much more alive... ditto Hannah. Weird things happen. It seems, that when the author puts too much of himself into the character, or maybe loves him too much, the reader gets a corpse instead of the protagonist.

On the whole, it could have been two good love stories. Unfortunately, tying things together at the end adds a good amount of banality to everything. Maybe it's only my opinion, but I waited for this kind of ending since the moment I found out there are two storylines... and I would have been very pleasantly deceived by the author, had I found none of that. Alas... I could have written this ending myself, so why bother reading?...

On the whole don't get me wrong, this book is worth at least a try. And after some 20 or 30 pages you won't be flooded by torrents of tears that often.

Total cheese-fest
This book is cliche, boring, badly written and strained.

The "twist" is painfully obvious from about the thrid page.

It's so corny it actually contains the words: "They told me I had TB, but I knew I was dying of a broken heart" - isn't that a line from The Simpsons?

The love stories are utterly unbeleiveable.

There's nothing redeeming at all about this book