Presentation Date:
This session was held on January 22nd, 2015. It featured the author, Anthony Marra and Russian journalist and Nieman Fellow Irina Gordienko, and was sponsored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program.
See a recording of this session here.
Accompanying non-fiction readings:
Prisoners of the Caucasus: Russia's Invisible Civil War by Charles King and Rajan Menon in Foreign Affairs.
Chechnya: How did it come to this? By Andrew Meier in National Geographic. [Note: There is a graphic image at the top of this article.]
Book synopsis
Two doctors risk everything to save the life of a hunted child in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together. Havaa, eight years old, hides in the woods of rural Chechnya and watches the blaze until her neighbor, Akhmed, discovers her sitting in the snow. Akhmed knows getting involved means risking his life, and there is no safe place to hide a child in a village where informers will do anything for a loaf of bread, but for reasons of his own, he sneaks her through the forest to the one place he thinks she might be safe: an abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.