Reader’s review: Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller

Nicholas is a British lawyer working in Russia. It’s sometime around the start of the last decade. Putin is in the full pomp of his first presidential term and it’s the golden age of the Wild East (the days of ‘tits and Kalashnikovs’ as Nicholas puts it). After meeting two young Russian women on the Metro by chance (or is it?) Nicholas finds himself falling in love with one of them. He is introduced to their ‘aunt’, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and a living symbol of Russia’s Soviet past (with all its ambiguities). Nicholas is happy, but deep down knows that all is not as it seems… ‘Snowdrops’, by the way, are corpses which emerge, in the spring, from the snow that concealed them through the winter. It’s in the spring that Nicholas finds a lot of secrets coming out, including his own complicity in things he’d kept secret from himself.