As editor-in-chief of Russia's leading art magazine, Anatoly Sukhanov earns a comfortable living bowdlerizing articles, inserting the requisite number of Lenin quotes, deleting the names of blacklisted artists, and writing his own treatises dismissing the whole of Western art. His position has afforded him a swanky Moscow apartment, where he lives with his beautiful wife and their two precocious children, invitations to the most exclusive social events, and even a taste of immortality by way of an impressive entry in The Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

But Sukhanov was not always a hack. In his youth, he had been a brilliant vanguard artist, inspired by the same Western art that he would later disparage. When state officials pronounced the young Sukhanov's work "anti-Soviet" and shut down his first art show at the Manège, the pressure forced him to choose — for himself and for his new wife and future children — between the persecution and struggle of life as an artist under Soviet rule and the comfort and security that would come from turning his back on his convictions.

And so he chose. But now the political climate in Russia is changing. It's the early days of Gorbachev, and the system that Sukhanov sold his soul to is threatening to abandon him and take with it his job, his status, and even his family. Growing up under a regime that relied so heavily on revisionist tactics — renaming the nation's cities and streets, rewriting history books, editing the faces of the executed from public photographs — Sukhanov is familiar with the process of forgetting, and long ago forced himself to banish all memories of his artistic past. But as his life begins to crumble, however, strange dreams and disturbing memories that refuse to be repressed any longer begin to assail him.

A whirling, ambitious debut novel from Russian émigré Olga Grushin, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a powerful story of a man — and his country — attempting to restore the truth of the past with the hope of creating a more honest future.

-Larissa Dooley