A Woman Loved - Tapa dura

Andreï Makine is among the most skilled and subtle authors working today, and this novel is one of his masterpieces. (Sarah Crown Times Literary Supplement.)

The visionary Makine has written yet another remarkable novel. A Woman Loved is about art, film-making, an artist's search for expression and a woman's desperate if despotic search for love. It is also about how ideas give life meaning. Above all, it is about Russia, past and present. (Eileen Battersby Irish Times.)

We are fortunate, in our own grey time, to have a novelist like Makine, and he has been fortunate in the translator who has brought all his books to the English-reading world. Geoffrey Strachan renders him perfectly into English. I have read Makine in both French and English, and Strachan contrives to make the English reading experience no different from reading the original French. This is remarkable. (Allan Massie Scotsman.)

With all the imaginative virtuosity he is known for, Andrei Makine has managed to construct a Russian doll-like novel, where the centuries overlap and replicate each other (Thierry Clermont Figaro)

By untangling the skein of two realities, two centuries apart, [Makine] has braided together art and life, fiction and reality (Macha Séry Le Monde)

Andrei Makine takes on the centuries with a mastery worthy of the most scholarly historian . . . A magnetic novel (Marianne Payot L'Express)

This novel about a film-maker writing, and trying to make, a film about Catherine the Great, first under the supervision of Soviet censors and then in the mad days of the Yeltsin presidency when the oligarchs ran wild and became precariously rich, is one of his best. And that's very high praise. (Spectator Books of the Year)