Days in the Caucasus

De: Banine

Narrado por: Anoushka Rava

Duración: 7 h y 58 m

Resumen del Editor

We all know families that are poor but 'respectable'. Mine, in contrast, was extremely rich but not 'respectable' at all....

Banine's family were peasants who became millionaires overnight when oil gushed from their lands - and the course of her own life would be just as dramatic.

This is her unforgettable memoir of an 'odd, rich, exotic' childhood, growing up in Azerbaijan in the turbulent early 20th century, caught between East and West, tradition and modernity. She remembers her luxurious home, with endless feasts of sweets and fruit; her beloved, flaxen-haired German governess; her imperious, swearing, strict Muslim grandmother; her bickering, poker-playing, chain-smoking relatives. She recalls how the Bolsheviks came, and they lost everything. How, amid revolution and bloodshed, she fell passionately in love, only to be forced into marriage with a man she loathed - until the chance of escape arrived.

By turns gossipy and romantic, wry and moving, Days in the Caucasus is a coming of age story and a portrait of a vanished world.

Cover credit (c) Anna Morrison

©2019 Banine (P)2019 Audible, Ltd

Yay for an amazing book

so thankful for this book & the narrator who did it justice. SO.good & so worth the wait 💕🙌🏻❤️

ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL

This author takes you a fantasy world of bygone times where societal norms, shockingly different than ours, told through the eyes of a child, is actually real. Kids play “massacre the Armenian,” wives demand that their husbands get another wife to keep them company, families fight and insult each other in unimaginable ways, an obscenely wealthy lifestyle comes to a violent end with Communism. Throughout all this, the reader/listener can’t help but smile at all that happens, for it is told by a crafty storyteller, blunt and humorous, and so captivating. Banine has been obscure for too long.

Kudos to the narrator whose thick accent, a mix of French and Persian, most apropos, gives a refreshing life to the story. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.