Rosie's only inheritance from her reclusive mother is a book of Russian fairy tales, but there is another story lurking between the lines.
Once upon a time, Rosie lived peacefully in Moscow and her mother told fairy tales at bedtime.
Then one summer night, all that came abruptly to an end when her father and sister were gunned down. Years later, Rosie is a doctoral student at Oxford, with a fiance who knows nothing of her former life and an ailing, alcoholic mother lost to a notebook full of eerie, handwritten little stories.
Desperate for answers to the questions that have tormented her, Rosie returns to her homeland and uncovers a devastating family history which spans the 1917 Revolution, the siege of Leningrad, Stalin's purges and beyond. At the heart of those answers stands a young noblewoman, Tonya, as pretty as a porcelain doll, whose actions reverberate across the century ...
