{"product_id":"9781101993514","title":"The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age \u003cb\u003eas an enemy of the people \u003c\/b\u003eand finding her voice in Stalinist Russia\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling novel \u003ci\u003eA Gentleman in Moscow \u003c\/i\u003eby Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In \u003ci\u003eThe Girl from the Metropol Hotel\u003c\/i\u003e, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —\u003cb\u003eAnna Summers, from the Introduction\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"Temple Publications International, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47077206556912,"sku":"9781101993514","price":50.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781101993514_p0.jpg?v=1763690135","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781101993514","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}