Snowdrops

by A.D. Miller

A.D. Miller's Snowdrops is a riveting psychological drama that unfolds over the course of one Moscow winter, as a thirty-something Englishman's moral compass is spun by the seductive opportunities revealed to him by a new Russia: a land of hedonism and desperation, corruption and kindness, magical dachas and debauched nightclubs; a place where secrets - and corpses- come to light only when the deep snows start to thaw...

A chilling story of love and moral freefall: of the corruption, by a corrupt society, of a corruptible man. It is taut, intense and has a momentum as irresistible to the reader as the moral danger that first enchants, then threatens to overwhelm, its narrator.

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Thriller, Crime, Mystery, Book Club, Literary Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

A. D. Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton. His first novel, Snowdrops – a study in moral degradation set in modern Russia – was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the CWA Gold Dagger and the Galaxy National Book Awards, and was longlisted for the IMPAC award. It has been translated into twenty-five languages. His second novel, The Faithful Couple, a story of friendship and remorse, was published in 2015. He is also the author of The Earl of Petticoat Lane, an acclaimed memoir of immigration, class, the Blitz and the underwear industry that was shortlisted for the Wingate prize.

A.D. Miller has been The Economist's Moscow correspondent, political columnist, writer-at-large and correspondent in the American South; in 2018 he became the magazine's culture editor. In 2014 he won Travel Story of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, for a piece about 24 hours at a motorway service station. He has been shortlisted three times for the David Watt Prize, for another FPA Award and for Political Commentator of the Year and Magazine Commentator of the Year at the Comment Awards. He has also written for the Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Daily Telegraph, Independent, Spectator, Literary Review, Evening Standard, Intelligent Life and 1843. He uses his initials because another novelist already had his name.

Reviews

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this country, snowdrops herald the longed-for arrival of spring.  Not so in Moscow, and certainly not in A.D. Miller’s compelling novel, where snow-buried bodies are revealed in the big seasonal thaw.
 
But if bodies can be buried, so too can morals, as displaced, thirty-something, British lawyer Nick discovers. His story, shot through with wry humour and acute observation, peels back the glamorous veneer of the Russian capital to expose the casual, ingrained, seedy violence that lies beneath.
 
It’s easy to forget the pull that Moscow had on Westerners in the 1990s.  The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a gigantic economic free for all, that foreign investors and lawyers found irresistible. The defunct empire’s mineral wealth was there for the plucking – and there was no shortage of ruthless would-be native oligarchs and ambitious Anglo-American advisors to aid and abet the plunder.
 
Because he speaks Russian, and has survived a handful of Moscow winters, Nick falls into the trap of thinking he’s actually one of them.  The fundamental truth about Russians, as Nick discovers in the course of his relationship with the enigmatic Masha, is that despite appearances, they are not like us. However much we would like them to, they do not share our agenda nor our way of looking at the world.
 
As one of Nick’s colleagues says, in Moscow there are no politics stories, there are no love stories, there are only crime stories.  Nick would not agree! However, this is perhaps his powerlessness to resist the allure of Masha, his trophy girl!

Miller’s skill is in keeping us turning the pages with anxious anticipation to discover how Nick’s affair will play out.

[Blair · Rating 2 out of 5]

I actually bought this book several months ago; a handful of good reviews combined with the setting, Moscow (I've been fascinated with Russia since my teens, and wrote my university dissertation on the Russian presidency) piqued my interest, but somehow I never got around to reading it. I only remembered it after learning that it's one of the thirteen books on the longlist for this year's Man Booker Prize. Billed as 'an intensely riveting psychological drama', Snowdrops follows about a year in the life of Nicholas Platt, an English lawyer living and working in Moscow. A chance encounter with two young women, sisters Masha and Katya, develops into a friendship and, with Masha, a rather one-sided relationship. Nick agrees to help the girls' ageing aunt with the sale of her flat; at work, meanwhile, he is involved in a business deal with a shady character known only as the Cossack. The reader knows from the beginning that something or other is going to go wrong, as Nick narrates his story from a future perspective, and drops occasional hints that all is not as it seems - particularly with regards to Masha. All in all, I started this book feeling very intrigued about what turns the plot might take, and relishing the Russian setting. However, it turned out to be one of the biggest reading disappointments I've had all year.

The first stumbling block was the main character. Nick is far from likeable - immature, judgmental, sexist and sleazy, a grown man who looks down on his own parents; I think he's meant to represent the corrupting influence of modern Russia on a gullible Westerner, but it seemed more likely to me that he just wasn't a very nice person to begin with. At first, I felt his unpleasant attitude to women and apparent lack of experience with them (we learn he's only ever had one relationship, with a girl from university) were surely down to youth. I assumed he was in his mid-twenties at the very oldest, so it was a significant shock when his age was dropped into the narrative and it turned out he was 38! It's clear his 'love' for Masha is more of an obsession, but she does nothing to justify it - she's portrayed throughout as cold and almost characterless. I would have found her more interesting and perhaps even someone I could sympathise with, except there's no meat on the bones of the character. There's no suspense involved in figuring out that she's deluding Nick - it couldn't be more obvious.

The second issue was the narrative structure. For some unknown reason, perhaps in an an attempt to add an extra layer of intrigue to the plot, the author has chosen to relate Nick's tale in the form of a letter to his present-day fiancée, looking back on his time in Moscow. This is problematic on so many levels. The fiancée character isn't so much one-dimensional as nonexistent - I couldn't get any sense of who she was, and the device was so cursory it felt as though it had been tacked on after the rest of the book was already written. Apart from that, the story doesn't work as a letter - there's too much dialogue and detail, and I refuse to believe any man would be so rigorously committed to telling the truth that he'd fill a letter to his current partner with details of threesomes with strippers, how many times he'd paid for sex, how irresistably sexy he found his ex-girlfriend, how he occasionally fantasised about her sister, and so on. This all happened years before he met the fiancée, so it's not as if there's any need for Nick to 'confess', and it's obvious the author just didn't want to leave the sex out of the story and has used the conceit of Nick's absolute honesty to justify its presence. Furthermore, when the book ends with Nick lamenting his present 'thin life' and how much he misses Masha and Moscow, it's impossible to understand how on earth he could have ended up becoming engaged to this woman, let alone why he'd bother to sit down and write a lengthy, confessional document to her.

The only thing I really liked about Snowdrops was the setting. The frozen wastes, seedy clubs and shabby flats of Moscow were all evoked well and I enjoyed how the corruption and bribery spawned by Russia's history were shown to have invaded every aspect of the characters' lives. But on the whole, the book isn't particularly well-written (there's a lot of repetition - try counting how many times Nick says 'one of those...' or 'it was, I think, [name of month]') and for a story brimming with degredation and vice, it's somewhat lacking in action. In fact, nothing much happens at all. It can basically be summed up thus: some people pretend to be something they're not to get money out of an unpleasant man who thinks with his dick. Big deal! Nicholas isn't even particularly upset or affected by the loss of the money, so the final 'revelations', if they can be called that after the heavy-handed hints dropped throughout the rest of the novel, don't have much impact.

I do generally look upon the Booker as a benchmark of sorts; I've read a number of Booker-nominated novels I haven't liked much, but I have at least generally found them to be high quality, well-crafted and so on. I suppose this must have made it onto the longlist for the same reason Emma Donoghue's horrendously overrated Room was shortlisted last year (though that at least had a bit of media hype and controversial subject matter going for it). I just can't believe the panel would overlook something like Gillespie and I for this! But I suppose that's beside the point. Personally, I wouldn't recommend this book at all, though perhaps other readers with different tastes might get more out of it. It's certainly not the worst thing I've ever read, but even so, I think there's too many other good reads out there for it to be worth the time.

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank god the font was big and the lines were almost double-spaced.

This story is really about Moscow. The people-characters are just props; the real characters are the city and the weather and the lawless society.
“The characters are flat, stereotypical creatures, but I havent figured out if this is an intended character flaw of the narrator, or if it is the author's intention as an auteur to convey something deeper or so far hidden, or if it just simply represents workmanlike craft, and is what it is.” Thats what I wrote about this book after reading the first few pages. I’ve figured out now that there’s nothing complicated here. It’s not even workmanlike craft, it’s more like the craft of an awkward apprentice.
It’s as if the author, A.D. Miller, who lived in Moscow himself for a few years as a correspondent for The Economist, wanted to think of a story, any kind of story, that he could drop into the set of Russia. This is understandable, since he had lived there and likely wanted to share his experiences. Russia the place is the main character -- the most developed and well described, compared with the people characters. The narrative arc wearily stumbles through the Moscow cold, numbing the reader’s interest, perked up only by energetic bursts of descriptions (most often yet another way to describe how cold it was).
The Moscow cold, the Moscow criminals, the Moscow daily life, the Moscow way of doing things. These are clearly the real main interest of the author, but it seems he felt he needed to create a conventional story that would give him license to provide that backdrop. The girls Masha and Katya are set props, dressing.
Why did the narrator Nick, an ex-pat lawyer, fall so hard for Masha? There is nothing in the story, not a smidgin, to explain it, to make it plausible. Did he fall for her because of her exquisite other-world beauty? She has hard red fingernails, dresses like a prostitute. That’s it? Is it because of the incredibly hot sex and the fiery passion she ignites in him? Don’t know, there are just some vague tepid references to a bit of carnal activity, occasionally slightly exhibitionist. There’s certainly no hint of any intellectual vigour, not in Masha or any of the other characters for that matter, including the narrator. There’s no hint of any meeting-of-the-souls kind of chemistry. And without any of that, the story just isn’t plausible.
The book is ostensibly the narrator relating to his fiancee the story of what happened to him in Moscow, but it is a clumsy artificial device. It is employed half-heartedly and sporadically, and so is all the more intrusive and annoying when it does appear.

The book is a decent start for a first novel, but I am absolutely stymied as to how it came even close for consideration to be on the Booker longlist, let alone the shortlist.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

'I smelled it before I saw it'.

This is the opening line and, apart from his odd use of the word 'smelled' instead of the more usual 'smelt' which grated on me a little, it is a great way to begin this novel which is all about not only the smell that rises off this newly uncovered and, at the beginning of the novel, unknown corpse but also the gradual rise of the stench of corruption not just from the government, officialdom and thugs of 21st Century Moscow but also the way our narrator Nick, an english lawyer, finds himself steeped in its filth and stink but unable, unwilling to detach himself from it.

The story is told not exactly in flashback but as a sort of confession to his unnamed fiancee. He is preparing to marry at some point and presumably, though it is never made clear, his conscience or what remains of it, has driven him to need to speak of what happened in the last eight months of his time in Moscow.

Three storylines weave in and out of each other; his professional 'lawyer-ing' including that carried out for a dubious Cossack Oil Magnate, his half-hearted attempts to help his elderly neighbour who is worried about the disappearance of one of his old friends from the flat opposite and the third, the main story, Nick's love/infatuation/addiction for a young russian woman, Masha, and how she cajoles/bribes/seduces him into helping her move her elderly aunt from a prized property in central Moscow to a new build on the outskirts.

This sounds perhaps drab and boring when set down cold on the page but it is a work of extraordinary power. You feel the dirt and depravity begin to drag you down as you read. Nick is a coward, a failure and, not to make too fine a point of it, a slimeball. To be fair, he does not really try to justify himself. His attempts to be honest to his fiancee and us his readers, his continual facing up to his failures and his recognition that deep down he knew for a long time what he was involving himself in, is a slightly redeeming feature. Right from the start of his account, Masha and her sister appear in the first few pages, he always punctuates everything with a down at heel commentary like a whipped dog cowering in a corner in disgrace. The story is one of betrayal, cruelty and unbelievable callousness, we know this almost from the start. Like that Damoclean sword it hangs, you know it must fall but you don't know why or how or to whom; that is part of the power of this book.

As a reader you are inside his infatuation but Miller, brilliantly in my opinion, keeps you detached enough to look on in horror as you begin to realize what has been done. So the story is a sobering one, the plot not intricate but gripping all the same. The characters are not well drawn but that is the point, we see everything through the eyes, sometimes justifying, sometimes guilt-ridden, of Nick.

Miller has a great turn of phrase and there is real humour in some of his analogies but it is interesting, and presumably purposeful, that these humourous images are always bleak and even they disappear and move out of sight totally as the story goes deeper.

Speaking of a Georgian taxi driver who had two religious icons in his cab - ' made me feel safer and more vulnerable at the same time - less likely to have my throat cut, but also that my life might be in the hands of someone who thought looking in the mirror or braking were God's worries rather than his '.

'It was the kind of moscow weather that makes you want the sky to just get on with it, like a condemned prisoner looking up at the blade of the guillotine'.

'He hd one of those senses of humour that are really a kind of warfare. laughing at his jokes made you feel guilty, not laughing at them makes you feel endangered '.

'the city authorities had pulled the flowers out of their beds, as they do every year when the game is up, carting them away in the night like condemned prisoners so they don't die in public'.

'The confused November sky reminded me of a black and white television set that hadn't been tuned in '.

Every now and again, Nick's adoration of Masha moves you to see his preparedness to behave as he did was almost unavoidable because of this adoration

'The fine blond hairs on the knots of her spine glowed in the moonlight from the window, like a love letter written on her body in invisible ink'....

I can almost forgive him being a bastard when you see that almost innocent gaze but then Miller's underlying theme never really goes very far away

'the snow let you forget the scars and blemishes, like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience'.

There is one coincidence from my reading future. I have just put Camus' 'L'Etranger' to read again on my bedside and one incident i remember clearly from my reading of it before was Meursault's watching the old woman sitting and painstakingly mark off in pen the programmes she plans to watch on tv that coming week. Nick, whilst visiting his parents back in England comes across

'the television guide in which she'd (his mother)put tragic asterisks next to the programmes she wanted to watch'

It struck me as interesting that Meursault, I seem to remember, had no response other than a noticing of the woman's meticulousness, Nick, in his own growing sense of being caught up in an exciting situation back in Russia, sees tragedy, loss and hopelessness in his mother's action. Her sad predictability is the thing he will, at all costs, seek to escape. It is this fear of mediocrity which drove him from London in the first place and pushes him on to do anything to keep his 'trophy girl'.

Towards the end we get a paragraph of some wisdom

Nick is in love with the idea and excitement and possibilities of Russian escape as much as he is with Masha. When things fall what lessons are learned ?

'It isn't your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself'.

The snowdrop is the lovely flower heralding the end of winter or it is the decaying corpse coming into view as the disguising snow disappears and reveals what was hidden. For the reader there are many corpses decaying, there is much lying hidden and Miller makes you think that horribly unthinkable thought

'If I was infatuated and swept up in love, how far would I let myself be swept ?'

Powerful, well worth the read.

[Maciek · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Booker nomination for this novel is a surprise; essentially, it is a rather unsurprising and mostly mediocre thriller with bits of good prose, few surprises and ultimately little payoff. Why was it chosen by the Booker committee as important enough to be included in the shortlist?

The structure of the novel reminded me of Martin Amis's House of MeetingsSnowdrops is an English lawyer trying to fit in contemporary Moscow, and addresses his experiences to an unnamed fiancee.

The author was a foreign correspondent for The Economist who lived in Russia for three years, and is eager to show his knowledge of the country with multiple descriptions of various details of life in the city - the experience of walking along one of the gorgeous metro stations, the particular feeling of late summer and early autumn. Moments like this are scattered throughout the book, but are not enough to make it worth reading; the story he tells is simply not engaging enough, and the characters are not particularly interesting.

The main protagonist, Nick Platt, is a thirtysomething English lawyer who lives a rather aimless existence in Russia of the 1990's - the newly established corporate sector is booming, and foreign banks are competing to give loans to emerging businesses; corruption thrives and shady deals are necessary to get anything done. it is in this world that Nick witnesses a young woman being robbed at a Metro station, and decides to help her - which introduces him to Masha and her sister Katya. Although he doesn't speak much Russian, he becomes acquainted with the two sisters and soon develops a deep interest in Masha - or rather a fascination bordering on obsession, being drawn to the girl like moth to a flame.

The main problem with the story comes with the author's choice of structure - Nick is writing down the events that he has already experienced, and from his tone it is obvious from the beginning that the flame burned him. I do not particularly see the point of addressing his notes to a fiance who is not even given a name - she does not appear as a character in any form, nor does Nick give away any details regarding her character or events from their relationship. She simply does not exist, and Nick's confession could have just been as well addressed to a complete stranger.

Nick is not a very engaging and interesting character as well - no one is. He comes off as a stereotypical, aimless expatriate - looking for some point of focus, but without much effort. The main love interest is an exotic, foreign woman, whose foreignness is the maddening force which blooms into open obsession (at one point Nick remarks about a mysterious "asiatic smile"). It doesn't matter that Masha does not show that she is interested in Nick, and does little to encourage him to pursue her in any way - although this can be explained as a deliberate choice made by the author, it largely exposes his plot choices and makes them obvious for the reader to see.

As mentioned, A.D. Miller spent three years in Russia and is obviously interested in the country he writes about it as if he wanted to impress his readers with how many details he managed to collect during his stay there - mostly about the multitude of various cultures that one can encounter inside it. This leads to the country not becoming a natural setting but rather more like a propped background - made to resemble the thing, but not allowed to develop naturally, as it was shaped by a selective vision, leading to the experience resembling a dramatization of the Lonely Planet.

In retrospection, this book reminded me of another Booker nominee - The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness, which was set in Romania just before the Revolution which ousted the Ceaucescus. I have similar complaints for both novels - the source material they were based on would be much better served as non-fiction, as fictional stories set in real tumultuous periods often end up cheapening and simplifying them. I would recommend this book only for Booker completists; thriller fans will probably not end up being very thrilled, while readers who are interested in Russia - such as yours truly - won't find anything enlightening or even interesting.

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dear Mr Miller

May I congratulate you on your debut novel, which I have just read and thoroughly enjoyed? It is, indeed, gripping and fairly addictive, precisely as the reviews promise. The plotting is beautifully crafted, those hints of the disaster to come are dropped to devastating effect. Thriller, yes, but a literary one too: you have a wonderfully expressive lick of language that tickles and delights, and the pleasure that your writing affords is more than the hedonistic joy of a rollicking ride to the chase. There are also the deeper themes of morality and self-deception and the mystery of erotic attraction.

And although I've never been East of Berlin myself, I'm sure that your portrayal of the Wild East is absolutely authentic. A colleague of yours at The Economist, Edward Lucas, writes on The Browser's feature Five Books: I think the country is really run by what amounts to a gangster syndicate which is ruthless in its pursuit of wealth and power, and distorts the machinery of the state in order to achieve that and to perpetrate crimes against the Russian people. So I think Russia is worse than the slightly sanitised picture we get in the media, not least because of libel laws that mean it’s quite hard to write clearly and bluntly about some of the people involved.
In that piece he recommends It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, saying that its author David Satter .. feels that the Soviet Union hollowed out both public and private morality and left people without a moral compass when it collapsed. He highlights some of the extraordinary instances of casual, amoral treatment of people by the system and by other people in the book. It’s quite a pessimistic book. He feels Russia has been poisoned by the Soviet past and until that poison is out of the system it is going to be sickened by it. I would imagine that this is a view that you entirely subscribe to, as the Snowdrop symbolism in your book might indicate.

However I'm afraid that this letter is not mere gushing fan mail. I am intrigued by a question that you may be able to help me with: was it some kind of quibbling doubt about the authenticity of your tale that made you embed it in a framework, a framework that claims the whole book was written by Nick Platt as a confession to his fiancee before the Big Day? I'm utterly at a loss to comprehend why you would find it necessary to make such a pretence? I see from your biography that you studied literature, I daresay you know of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's theory that the fictiveness of novels resides not in the mimesis of the world, but in the mimesis of speaking, of telling. "The essential fictiveness of novels is not to be discovered in the unreality of the characters, objects, and events alluded to, but in the unreality of the alludings themselves. In other words, in a novel or tale, it is the act of reporting events, the act of describing persons and referring to places, that is fictive. The novel represents the verbal action of a man reporting, describing and referring."
Now I would say that this is an accepted convention of novels, not since the very early days of Renaissance fiction have authors felt it necessary to authenticate their narrative by claiming that it is a manuscript that has been discovered and 'edited' rather than invented. That may well have been due to a leftover medieval distrust of 'inventio'. Surely nowadays, we appreciate a well-imagined tale and can accept it as such? My feeling was that in drawing attention to the motivation behind writing down this beautifully crafted story in fact, in the end, detracts from it. Whereas I can believe completely and implicitly in the Moscow that you conjure up before my eyes so vividly, I cannot swallow the idea of a man making such an incriminating confession to the woman he hopes to marry. Unless, of course, he actually wants to back out of the commitment. Ah, is that what you mean? Is Nick deliberately scuppering his chances? Because I don't believe that his wedding will go ahead now - not, I might add, because of doubts based on his moral degeneracy, but rather because he reveals his lack of passion for the future Mrs Platt.

But then, the extra layer of intriguing puzzle is precisely what lifts this out of your ornery thriller category. So maybe that was the effect you desired, to get the reader thinking. Chapeau, monsieur!

Yours

Karen

[K.D. Absolutely · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first book about Russia post-USSR meltdown. A. D. Miller is a British expat, being The Economist magazine correspondent assigned to work for 3 years in Russia in the early 2000's. His storytelling is straightforward, his sentences are short but full of sense and this story is believable. His use of Russia as a backdrop with its snow is just bewildering that reminded me of those white-everywhere scenes in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.

I have read a good chunk of Booker-winning and shortlisted works but this is my first time to encounter a suspense-thriller novel similar to the works of John Le Carre (guy lit with a heart without being melodramatic) and John Le Burke (for the use of the setting to heighten the mood of the novel).

The story revolves around Nick who is writing a letter to his new fiancee about his stay in Russia as company lawyer. Russia is a corrupt country and their white snow seems to be in full contrast with the rotten government officials and shrewd businessmen. The poor Russians are the ones who are suffering as they lose their property, resort to prostitution or commit crimes. A snowdrop in Russia is either the flower indigenous to that country or the victim of crime whose dead body is buried in snow only to surface out when the snow thaws.

I'd like to write more but I despite having finished only the first two paragraphs above, I had already gotten 12 votes so I guess my GR friends prefer reading short reviews so I better end this now.

You see, I wrote a long 6-paragraph review this morning but when I clicked the Save button, GR said "The review does not exist." So, I had to reconstruct my review but it was already 8:00 a.m. and I needed to start working.

[Szplug · Rating 3 out of 5]

First off, Miller did himself no favors by bestowing upon this book—and it's a beautiful design, wintry fresh with that inveigling top photo-blend of a miniscule, bundled-up couple traipsing across a walled corner of a desolate and frigid Red Square that is slowly fading to gray—the saccharinely absurd title of Snowdrops. It's the rubric one would give to a tale of candied bunny rabbits and cavity-filled teeth—with perhaps a little meth tossed in to give it some scratch—in a laminated child's romp through Santa's Workshop at the North Pole. What Miller has actually constructed here, an expat's confession of sleaze, snow, deception, and reach-arounds in the modern neon-crush and bone-chilling materiality of a Moscow where almost anything goes and what you can't protect is there for the taking, would have worked better with a handle that tasted bitter and aroused images of shadows slipping away, like curdled morals, from an arctic sun. Snowdrops, all prancy and poncy, sets the reader back, tips him off-balance, before the spine has even been creased; so perhaps it's a minor miracle that it actually reached enough people who count to have been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

There seems to be a not inconsiderable number of people who, having read this book, expressed their surprise—in tones of bewilderment, indignation, disbelief and/or bemusement—that it made it that far, that it is a sign of what the Man Booker has stooped to in this electronic era that such a meagre offering was even considered for the award in the first place. There are also those who don't care for the large font size of the work—and peoples, I hear you—what with the simpleton aura it brings to the whole; who find the epistolary conceit of the narrative, a confessionary letter from a rather loquacious groom-to-be to his one-dimensional and ill-formed fiancée, to be a gimmicky tack-on that does little but offer a thin hook upon which to hang the weaselly bastard; who deem the grifts that are at work within, unfolding in multiple directions upon multiple personages, to have been so obvious and telegraphed that, absent a suspension of disbelief that the author neither requests nor warrants, the entirety simply cannot stand as conceived; and, the preeminent complaint in the reviews that I've both read and glossed-over: that the narrator, Nick Platt, an expatriate English lawyer living in Moscow during the early-to-mid years of the first decade of our new millennium—a time when Moscow was transitioning itself from being the living embodiment of Cowboy Capitalism to something dressed in finer clothes, carrying itself in a more worldly manner, demanding for itself a higher level of respect, while remaining just as willing, almost eager, to cut your throat at the slightest sign of weakness—is such a gutless, morally malleable, wishbone pricklet of a man that, unable to garner a shred of sympathy for himself from the reader, his presence leaves the entire affair with an unpleasant odor, a befouling feel, that lingers unsatisfactorily after this grim little workout has been put to rest.

Is all of this a bit harsh? I think so. In one of the review blurbs on the back, the author is pumped-up as being Graham Greene on steroids; and while I don't hold him to be at the level of that great and prolific Catholic Englishman, Miller writes with a simplified elegance and a direct lyrical touch that, while occasionally threatening to descend to the rank of the merely serviceable, never actually does; indeed, it proves to possess itself of a power all of its own, for I motored my way through Snowdrops in two settings and was absorbed the entire time. It produced no starbursts, no flushes of joy, but I was never less than intrigued, and at all points entertained. The story aside, the real star of Snowdrops is Miller's pitch-perfect-in-the-telling depiction of modern Russia: its wild antics and chaotic violence in the clutch-and-grab days of the nineties anarchy after everything had fallen to pieces, and the more upscale, more outwardly charming, more rakishly debonair, but equally ruthless state-of-affairs in the twenty-first century as a country aware of its riches in natural resources and determined to drown in western capital if that's what is required. The wealthy in Moscow revel in obscene prodigality, in hopping via armored SUV from one luxuriously decadent, music-pulsing, and thoroughly energized nightclub to another, each one prized for its unique manner of posing nude young women, while the eminently corruptible police, politicians, and judiciary make it a place of endless possibilities for the rich, one of endless misery and withdrawn chariness for those—the vast majority—who are not. Similar to Greene, Miller excels at painting the life of an expat in convincing colors, in getting to the heart of both what appalls and attracts in a country where so many things are similar, but never quite right; where the allure of the barbaric cannot be separated from that of the forbidden and, in any case, proving almost impossible to resist, begins to abrade whatever served to separate the foreigner from the native—if it was ever more than illusion to begin with.

The story itself is relatively simple: Platt's a lawyer for a corporation that negotiates stipulatory contracts between European banks eager to lend money and the resource-exploiting Russian corporations that are desperate to borrow. Whilst in the midst of arranging a $500 million loan to a ruthlessly charismatic Cossack—a man with criminal airs who heads up a consortium wishing to convert an old supertanker into a floating transfer port for an Arctic oil pipeline—Nick also finds himself falling for the older of a pair of sisters whom he rescued from a purse-snatcher in the Russian Metro. Seeing in Masha a steely sensuality that is irresistibly attractive, Nick finds himself pursuing this tawny Slavic gazelle—whose beautiful and charmingly naïve younger sister, Katya, accompanies her everywhere—even while the two girls retain about them a beguiling distance, a sense of mystery. After Masha's throaty growls and bedroom acrobatics have convinced the approaching-middle-aged professional that he has fallen in love, he is introduced to the girl's aunt, an elderly lady named Tatiana Vladimirovna, a plucky survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and Communist misrule who requires Nick's services to assist her in a move to a Moscow suburb. However, with the brutal cold and crunching ice of the seemingly endless Russian winter serving as temporal marker, Nick's relationship with these lopsidedly-smiling Russian kinswomen, and that of the twinkle-eyed Cossack impatiently awaiting his money, come to reveal themselves in a troublingly sinister light. The game, as they say, is afoot.

I suppose it could have been done better—the evolving attraction between Nick and Masha shown at work upon the page, rather than appearing formed in statements; a better device than the abrasively cynical, stripper-ogling reporter, long exiled to Moscow, crafted to deliver expositions upon the state of modern Russia; but these complaints are fairly tepid, because Miller takes this material—and it's shopworn, folks, been done, more or less, in countless books previously pumped from the press—and makes it work; maximizes his limitations and reveals some pretty impressive strengths. What's more, the final two complaints I etched above—that Nick's gullibility in select areas is unbelievable, and that his character is a grade-A prick—present themselves as no problem at all for such as myself. I've been a spineless worm, failing to do the right thing if an easy, relatively painless way out was made available; I've been blind to what was obvious in a desperate attempt to make something that was false, that had too many pieces that simply didn't fit, out to be something that just might—if the eyes were squeezed shut tightly enough and the fingers kept crossed with a bruising fervor—prove itself true in the end; I've suppressed suspicions, itchy doubts, that threatened to shatter an edifice I'd painstakingly erected to let in some needed light; I've been nearing forty and alone in a crowded city and looking around, wild-eyed, for a taste of those young days when the tank was always full and the air was wet with the promise of what might be. In other words, hell yeah, I've been Nick, stood in his shoes, made his bad choices. That's why, at the end, I felt more sympathy for the man than dislike; and that's a testament to what Miller was able to access and bring to the page in this pleasantly surprising read.

[Jovana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ahhh, hvala Nebesima što sam joj ugledala kraj! Ovo je takvo gubljenje vremena... Ne znam kako sam došla na ideju da je čitam, i prezirem sebe što ne mogu da odustanem kad sam već počela!
Ne preporučujem je. Predlažem da je dodate na listu knjiga "za izbegavanje".

[Darryl · Rating 1 out of 5]

This novel, which was curiously shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize, is set in Moscow during the go-go 1990s, when the Russian economy opened up to foreign investment, and a select few became multi-millionaires. The narrator is a 38 year old British lawyer whose firm has sent him there to negotiate corporate deals and make money for the firm's clients. He sees a robbery taking place on a Moscow Metro station, and prevents a thief from robbing the purse of a young Russian beauty. Naturally, they strike up a conversation, exchange phone numbers, meet, and quickly become lovers (yawn). She and her sister introduce him to their aunt, and the three women encourage our naïve and clueless narrator to provide legal assistance and financial support to the aunt's desire to buy property outside of the city. Can you see where this is going? Do you care where this is going? If so, or, like me, are driven to complete the Booker Prize shortlist or longlist, go ahead and read this book, which earns 1½ stars from me. Otherwise, I would ask for a refund if you've already purchased it, or strike it from your wish list.

[James Thane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A British lawyer, Nicholas Platt, is working in Moscow in the hectic, free-for-all, Wild East days of the new Russia. By day he helps negotiate huge bank loans to facilitate Russia's economic development. These deals involve a number of shady characters and questionable assumptions, but Nick is caught up in the free-wheeling, anything goes climate, and whatever moral scruples he might have brought with him from the UK are quickly eroding. The same is true of his personal life as Nick gets caught up in exotic and often erotic lifestyle that flows from the rivers of cash that are flooding through the city.

One afternoon, Nick saves two attractive sisters from a purse snatcher and he is soon involved romantically with Masha, the older of the two. The women are very mysterious; even Masha reveals little of herself to Nick. But he is too caught up in the intimacy which he believes to be love. Then Masha and her sister, Katya, ask Nick to help their elderly aunt in the sale of her apartment and the purchase of a new one. It quickly becomes apparent to Nick that this deal may not be completely legitimate, but by now he is completely bedazzled by Masha, and his moral compass has long since lost the ability to find True North. He knows he is almost certainly heading for a fall, but like any true noir character, he's long past caring.

This is an excellent debut novel that paints a gripping portrait of the new Russia and the seduction of man who is powerless to resist its allure. It should appeal to those who like their novels dark and their characters flawed and in the grip of an attraction beyond their power to control.

[Baba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man Booker Prize (and CWA Gold Dagger) 2011 long listed. An absorbing tale of an 'Englishman abroad' in the modern Moscow getting caught up in the wild way things work in modern Russia and being taken down paths unknowingly, but may be not unwillingly. A great read, a mish mash of suspense thriller, first person mid-life crisis, modern Russia and the naked aggression of pure capitalism and where it leads. Recommended! 8 out of 12

[Melanie Garrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard about this novel on The Review Show on BBC2 and was intrigued enough by the discussion to break my resolution about not buying any more books until (a) they were available for Sony eReader; and (b) I was ready to read them.

But right from the exquisite jacket design, I was so gripped with this book that I decided a physical copy was in order. I picked up Sunday evening, and would have happily read it in one sitting if only life hadn’t been so tortuously in the way.

As first time novels go, this is an enormous achievement. The prose is dazzling and Moscow is evoked in a way that makes this the Gorky Park of the new millennium. The plot is entirely linear, and is essentially the inevitable forward motion of one man’s failure to swerve any of the moral hazards he encounters while working as an expat lawyer in Russia. The narrator is very clear about what a flawed and cowardly creature he is, and yet it is a joy to read on because of the insights he offers into Russian culture and society.

As someone who has lived and worked as an expat in two European countries, I felt this book really nailed that heady sense of possibility that comes with the early stages of living abroad; the feeling that you can be who you want to be, run risks you never would normally take because you’ve stepped out of time for a bit.

To me, this was neatly underlined by the notion that the text was effectively a long, confessional letter from the narrator to his fiancée. During discussion on The Review Show there were those who felt this narrative conceit didn’t quite work, but personally I found it added real resonance to the novel. By quietly reminding us now and then that the narrator did actually want his wife-to-be to have a good opinion of him, and to accept him depraved past and all, we were reminded that the real stakes here are moral jeopardy. Depravity is only interesting if those engaging in it have their doubts, and so find their own behaviour wanting.

All in all, this a novel to thoroughly enjoy and admire, and I would have given this five stars if not for two things which began to grate by the end. Firstly, I’d have been happier if the two parallel strands of the plot had amplified each other more in some way, rather than simply being two different examples of the same character’s moral indifference. Secondly, I found the prose relied a bit too heavily on unwarranted foreshadowing, which then tended not to deliver as big a bang as promised somehow.

But overall, there is no shortage of things for the reader to be gripped by, and to admire. I only hope A.D. Miller is out there somewhere right now putting the finishing touches on his next novel.

[Igor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Extremely shallow.
It looks like the author spent some time in Moscow (and Moscow is not Russia, there is a huge difference between the two, which is not highlighted in the book), listened to a few ex-pat stories and came up with the book.
Since it is not deep enough, sometimes you encounter funny moments like one of the girls telling the main character that her father worked on an ice-breaker called "Petrograd" during soviet times. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Russian history would have understood right away that it would be impossible during soviet times to call anything a name that reminded of Tsars (they renamed St-Petersburg to Leningrad). In other places the blunts are less obvious but are still present.
Basically, it is just full with stereotypes and some cheesy mental dilemmas the main character is having Probably, with the latter author was trying to mimic Dostoevsky's famous work, but if you are a mediocre lightweight boxer you usually do not take on heavyweight champions, and if you try it just looks pathetic as does this book.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oni koji traže akciju, napetost u ovoj priči neće dobiti ni doživjeti. U potrazi sam za dinamikom tako da ovdje nisam to dobila. Lijepo je pisano ali usporeno prepričavanje. Baš sam se pitala zašto ima tako nisku ocjenu na GR? ...eto sada znam.

[Lorenzo Berardi · Rating 2 out of 5]

It seems like initials rather than first names are a token for success in the English speaking literature. Let's think about J.R.R. Tolkien, P.G. Wodehouse, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and, more recently, to J.K. Rowling.

This is probably what A.D. (Andrew Dylan? Annus Domini? Arkady Dandy?) Miller has thought while choosing his nom de plume: "If I do that, if I omit my birth names and replace them with capitol letters, then I have more chances of entering the pantheon of the successful novelists".

This expedient apparently worked when Mr Miller was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize with his first novel. At the end of the day, our A.D. was not the winner, but managed to get a handful of good reviews around, convincing even his politically correct colleagues at The Economist to praise him.

Much ado about nothing - as William Shakespeare would have said (out of his envy for not being christened W.J.R. Shakespeare)?
Quite likely, but let's not be too harsh with our A.D.

"Snowdrops" is, as many readers pointed out, a novel about Moscow. Mr Miller spent several years of his young life reporting from the Russian capital and got clearly ensnared by its seductive grim flamboyance.
The problem with this book is that what our A.D. saw and felt in Moscow appears only sporadically here with a bunch of good periods being blown away by one of the most impressive collection of cliches you could dream of.

What some gym obsessed (and probably drunk) reviewer at the Daily Mail called "like Graham Greene on steroids" should be read like "a minor Graham Greene on sex hormones". Honestly, the only similarity I can find here between the brilliant prose and subterranean tension of Greene and the dull sex-driven Muscovite life portrayed by Miller is the banality of the main protagonist.
A banality which is only apparent and subtle in Greene, but a block of reinforced concrete in Miller.

Nicholas "Kolya" Platt here is a pathetic odd person who pretends to be 38 years old (come on! he cannot be 38! not this guy!) and rummage through Moscow parvenu-infested night-clubs as a British kid on a school-trip being afraid that a teacher may scold him.
The literary expedient of having Nicholas writing to his fiancee back in England about his Russian adventures is awfully unrealistic and it seems like the same A.D. Miller forgot about it more than once while the story goes on.

The catalog of unfortunate choices made by our A.D. is pretty long for such a short book and includes a bunch of unnecessary English translations just like this selected gem:

"Normalno - he replied (Normal)".

Overall, Mr Miller desperately tries to convince us that he did the real thing. He lived in Moscow not only wrote about it and therefore he knows what "tak" and "spasibo" mean.
Wow! That's remarkable. Not really "normalno", isn't it?

Not too bad. Not too bad indeed.
If only our A.D. could have remembered that he is - or was - a journalist explaining, say, that "The Great Patriotic War" one of the characters refers to at some point is actually World War II as called by the Russians, I would have been less critical with him.
That and the way "Kolya" is mesmerized by discovering that the word "sister" could also mean "cousin" in Russian after nearly 4 years he spent in Moscow.
Wow! What a scoop. But after all, quoting gospodin Platt:

"I was on my way to being fluent, but my accent still gave me halfway through my first syllable".

Yes, of course, the accent.
But let's just report another shining example of Mr Miller's blatantly cheap style, the one in which Nicholas Platt meets the Russian doll he will fall "in love" (should read lust) with:

"Spasibo - said Masha. (Thank you). She took off the sunglasses.
She was wearing tight tight jeans tucked into knee-high brown leather boots, and a white blouse with one more button undone than there needed to be.
Over the blouse she had one of those funny Brezhnev-era autumn coats that Russian women without much money often wear. If you look at them closely they seem to be made out of carpet or beach towel with a cat-fur collar, but from a distance they make the girl in the coat look like the honey-trap in a Cold War thriller. She had a straight bony nose, pale skin and a long tawny hair, and with a bit more luck she might have been sitting beneath the gold-leaf ceiling in some hyper-priced restaurant called the Ducal Palace or the Hunting Lodge, eating black caviar and smiling indulgently at a nickel magnate or well-connected oil trader".

Now, wait a moment.
How many stereotypes you can count here?
Let's ignore the useless translation of a single word put in brackets as well as the Oxford comma and the evident fetishism for the hyphen (7 in 10 lines!). Let's just focus on the cliches.

The Russian girl looks like a bimbo, therefore she must be poor, therefore she has to wear a Brezhnev-era coat with sunglasses and those tight tight jeans and a half open blouse. But, being this Masha a poor girl she is also unlucky, therefore with a little bit of fortune she could have hooked the right pimp who must definitely be a nickel magnate or an oil trader and eats caviar. Oh really? Don't even tell me! Anna Chapman, c'est moi.
I'm afraid our A.D. only forgot about vodka, a Zhiguli, a dacha and a balalaika.
Ah no. Obviously all of this stuff is also included in "Snowdrops". Apart from the balalaika, quite surprisingly. Perhaps our man in Moscow doesn't like folk music.

To cut it short, this book doesn't have too much to say.
You may expect some action, but there is almost none. You may expect some sex and well, there is a little, but in a chilly voyeuristic fashion which looks like exhibitionism.
All in all, there are maybe three or four characters here who don't look like parodies, but they don't manage to rescue "Snowdrops" from dying down without a shake.

[Samantha Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. It's by no means a fast paced psychological thriller but it is compulsive reading and it had me wanting to turn the pages (or at list click through on the Kindle!).

The story is a reflection, by the main character (Nick), of his time in Moscow as a young lawyer. It's told by way of a narrative to his fiance which in itself is interesting given the events that follow! He meets and falls in love with a Russian girl and experiences the hedonism of a culture free from morals! I think I knew what was coming from a very early stage of the book but unlike other novels this wasn't a disappointment. The joy for me was in the way the story unfolded and the Nick's response to the events, in particular his thoughts and emotions.

It's a book about love or lust, curruption and hedonsim. I think the author did a fabulous job of bringing modern day Moscow alive in my mind. The narrative is wonderful and I can't wait for his next novel!

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing, engaging, somewhat mysterious, fairly realist novel about life in Moscow, Russia, in the 1990s. The story is narrated by Nick, a high flying British 35 year old lawyer who had been living in Moscow for three and a half years. Nick is seduced by 23 years old Masha, who leads him through her city of nightclubs and intimate dachas.

Nick, in his lawyer’s role, is able to help Masha’s aunt in the aunt’s property sale and purchase transactions. Nick did all the property conveyancing. Nick was also involved in a corporate bank loan deal for a property shipment project.

The novel begins slowly, building to a well plotted ending. The book provides an interesting insight into the Russian way of life and the rampant corruption that occurs in many business transactions.

I found the novel to be an interesting, rewarding reading experience.

This book was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize.

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Snowdrops are the dead, who appear like the eponymous spring flower as the winter snows recede from the winter wonderland of moscow's streets. Except they are not flowers, they're frozen corpses and the difference between blooming and rotting is quite a distinct one that even the most inexperienced botanist or ardent fan of spring watch would be hard pushed to miss.

None of the characters in the book are particularly likeable so you won't spend a lot of time sympathising about their plight or vodka soaked, caviar smeared datcha based worries. The plot is a little predictable but the fact that you've already second guessed the motivations of the principal characters keeps you hooked and waiting for the climax where you hope you'll be proved wrong. A strong first novel which was very readable.

[Adina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another one for my little project to read books that were waiting for me for a while. I bought the kindle version by mistake and I did not see the "Bought by mistake button'. So I kept it.

I am not sorry I bought it although I am not overly happy either. The main characters of this book is Moskow and the plot is just a pretext to write about the city. I enjoyed the description of Moscow and its problems but I was not very fond of the action.

[ALPHAreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Snowdrops’ is the debut novel from British writer, A D Miller.

Nick Platt is a British lawyer living and working in Moscow, Russia. The city is a hedonistic dream – nightclubs, women and with enough money you can get anything you desire. Moscow is a playground for wealthy businessmen, ex-KGB and one lonely Pommie ex-pat.
One night, Nick meets and beds two beautiful Russian women, and falls in love with one of them (‘Masha’ to her friends). To help Masha’s aunt, Nick gets involved in the Russian real estate business. But nothing in this city is at it seems and everything comes with a price.

‘Snowdrops’ is the perfectly inconspicuous title for this psychological chiller. ‘Snowdrops’ refers to Moscow slang, a corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows emerging only in the thaw. It’s a perfect title for this unassuming little book that has quite a bite to it.

Miller has written in one of the most sophisticated but difficult literary traps – an unreliable narrator. Readers wade through Nick’s first-person narrative with seeming trust – but pretty soon he slips up. Little details are missing or disturbingly swept under the rug and reader’s slowly come to realize that Nick’s perspective is somewhat skewed;

When I got home that evening I found a smear of blood along the inside walls of my building, running up the stairs at about waist heights. Outside one of the doors on the second floor the blood plummeted downwards, as if the person leaning against the wall and leaking it had collapsed there. Underneath there was a little blood puddle, and next to the puddle a pair of old black shoes, standing neatly parallel to one another with their laces done up.
When I went downstairs in the morning the blood had been washed off the walls, but the shoes were still there. It was one of the alcoholics on the top floor, someone told me later. He fell. It was nothing to worry about, they told me.

It took a little while for me to realize that Nick wasn’t the most reliable of narrators . . . and quite frankly, in a novel of many twists and turns Nick’s unreliability was one of the biggest and best. Miller is right up there with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Alfred Hitchcock for his perfectly-pitched unreliable narration. Brilliant.

‘Snowdrops’ is a psychological thriller. You have to go through the novel separating the wheat from the chaff – truth from fiction and cover-up. And it’s ever harder to do when the backdrop is Moscow. I have never been to Russia myself, but Miller evokes a time and place that seems outlandishly real. Russia as a city torn down by history and the decline of the USSR. A place of double-dealings and shady corners; at once eerily beautiful and unremorsefully seedy. It’s all encapsulated in that one metaphor for snow and ‘snowdrops’ – something of purity that blankets a place and makes it look pristine for a little while, until the thaw comes to reveal the bodies underneath . . . chilling and apt, where Russia is concerned.

A.D. Miller’s debut novel won’t be for everyone – he’s writing is stark and unremorsefully tangled – he’s writing unreliably and beautifully.

[TC · Rating 5 out of 5]

I noticed this book when it was shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize, and was drawn to it by the description as "an intensely riveting psychological drama" My luck with award winners is a bit mixed, and I quite liked another of the short-listed books, Pigeon English so thought I would give this a go.

The book is narrated by Nicholas, in the form of a confession to his betrothed, relating the events of his last winter in Russia. He was working as a lawyer, with the transfer to Russia a potential shortcut to a partnership. A chance encounter with Masha and Katya sets him on a path to moral free fall, and sees him become no better than the many corrupt, hedonistic individuals he has previously been so quick to criticise.

Snowdrops introduces the reader to a bleak landscape, populated by gangsters and prostitutes, where strip clubs and young girls trying to snag themselves a rich husband are par for the course. I loved the descriptive power the author uses to evoke both the tourist landmarks that were familiar from TV and magazines, but also the residential and less salubrious areas. There is also an interesting amount of historical detail and the older Russian characters with their proverbs and stories from the past were very engaging.

There is so much to this book, for example we see various scams that range from the small scale to those involving State bodies. The narrative style made it feel very direct and as it was clear from the start that something had gone quite badly wrong, and as the details slowly revealed themselves, I found myself desperate to keep reading. It was interesting to see Nicholas as both victim and perpetrator, and consider how he had found himself in the position he did. I'm not sure whether I was chilled by the vividly depicted Russian winter or how far things went.

This is a brilliant tale of corruption and lust, and of moral decline on a personal and a much larger scale. What a debut.

[Hanneke · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Snow Drops’ was één van de boeken die op de shortlist stonden voor de Booker Prize 2011. Het boek geeft een fascinerend inkijkje in het moderne Russische leven. Het is verbazingwekkend te lezen hoe corruptie, bedrog, afpersing en misdadigers van allerlei rang en stand het leven van iedereen in Rusland beheersen. Als gewone burger moet je constant alert blijven en kan je alleen maar hopen dat je niet het slachtoffer wordt van een of andere zwendel, zelfs als je helemaal niet vermogend bent. Citaat uit het boek wanneer de hoofdpersoon een notariskantoor bezoekt: I guess that when the music stopped and the evil empire collapsed and the Russians looked at each other for a split second before grabbing whatever they could, these notaries had somehow wound up with a room that had once housed a troupe of acrobats or lion tamers. Het boek beschrijft veel vreemde plekken, zoals dit notariskantoor. En nog meer exotische oorden, zoals de waanzinnige, thematische nachtclubs zoals deze: .. two leggy redheads who were chasing each other round a striptease pole behind my left shoulder, one of them dressed as a rabbit (elasticated ears, furry white tail), the other as a bear (claws, bearskin bra, little brown nose). Russki Safari, I think the strip joint was called.
De vrij keurige Britse advocaat vennootschapsrecht, Nick, wordt langzaam in een net van grootschalige zwendel ingekapseld, terwijl hetzelfde op kleinere schaal gebeurt in zijn privé leven. Nick keert graag zijn ogen af van dingen, die hij liever niet wil zien. Dat breekt hem op.
Ik vond het geen Booker Prize waardig boek, maar zeker wel interessant door de bizarre leefomgeving waarin de hoofdpersoon verkeert. Het was ook leerzaam in de zin dat je, na lezing van dit boek, nooit meer met dezelfde ogen naar Rusland kijkt en ook niet naar die opgedirkte Russische vrouwen die je, beladen met tassen van dure merken, over de P.C. Hooftstraat ziet snellen.

[Egle Gus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Žiauru. Tikiu, nors tiksliai garantuoti negaliu, nes pati nesusidūriau (ir tikiuosi niekada nesusidurti), kad tokie dalykai vyko ir vyksta iki šiol Rusijoje. Kažkaip net nemaloniai jaučiausi beskaitant šią knygą, koks baisus ir negailestingas gali būti bandymas išgyventi šalyje, kurioje matomas akivaizdus skirtumas tarp vargšų ir turtuolių, kurioje viską lemia pinigai bei pažintys valdžioje ir atrodo nebėra nieko tikro, nuoširdaus ir gero. O kas nepatiko šioje knygoje, tai veikėjo Nikolo naivumas ir neapdairumas. Su mama diskutavome: ji pateisino šias jo savybes, kaip nežinojimą ir netikėjimą, kad gyvenime gali vykti tokie dalykai, tačiau aš visiškai nesutinku, nes knygoje buvo rašoma, kad jis lyg ir nujaučia bei supranta, kad kažkas vyksta ne taip, juolab, jis buvo teisininkas, tačiau absoliučiai nieko nedarė, net nesistengė pakeisti įvykių sekos, o tik aklai ir beatodairiškai toliau "plaukė jam patogia vaga", kas galiausiai privedė prie tragiškų dalykų.

[Biserka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Odlican krimic. Ako je uopste krimic, nije mi jasna ta kategorizacija ponekad. Po meni puno kompleksnija, slozenija i interesantnija prica o susretu dva svijrta, danas i prilicno aktuelno

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moscow at the turn of this century could be a dangerous place: almost anything could be bought or extracted for a price, and many people were, for one reason or another, in on some deal or scheme to get ahead in the business of money, comfort or influence. Life was also fragile, people disappeared without a trace, only to turn up as "snowdrops" during the spring thaw. With his debut novel, SNOWDROPS, AD Miller delves into the unfettered, yet also manipulated, period of early capitalism in Russia that followed the collapse of the Soviet regime. Part crime, part love story, Miller's fast-paced, fluidly written and engaging novel combines these elements within a chilling psychological portrait of an expatriate corporate lawyer, who has been living comfortably in "wild Moscow". Miller's book is on the shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize.

These are the Russian "gold-rush days", and Nick, Nicolai Ivanovich to the locals, a British lawyer, is caught up in financial and other dealings in more ways than one. Despite slowly realizing that all may not be as it appears with his new girlfriend, Masha, her sister Katya and Tatiana Vladimirovna, their aunt, and warnings from his cynical journalist friend, Steven Walsh, he cannot extricate himself from their influence. Rather, Nick prefers to adopt the popular advice of the day "the less you know, the longer you live".

In his business dealings Nick is as gullible, going with the flow: "Money in Moscow had its own particular habits", he muses by way of explanation and justification for his actions. "Money knew that someone in the Kremlin might decide to take it back at any moment..." Nick writes his story with hindsight, confessing "all, as honestly as I can", to his soon to be wife (he hopes). He admits to her that he was terribly naïve and totally in love with the mysterious Masha. He was blinded by his urge to "find the one", who would take him out of his pathetic early midlife crisis mood. He is still drawn to his life in Moscow, despite everything. Moscow can have that effect on those who have spent time there...

AD Miller evidently knows those effects. His intimate knowledge - as correspondent for The Economist - of Moscow and Russia, its diversity of peoples, and its sociopolitical reality of the time, adds to the story's authenticity and makes the locales more than a backdrop, but rather a lively participant in the unfolding human dramas. While we readers are fully absorbed in the novel's events, sometimes understanding earlier than the protagonist the associations between different people's actions, I could not help also thinking of developments beyond the confines of Russia and the early twentieth century. Many of the issues that Miller touches on are with us, even if in different, more subtle or hidden forms.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This year’s Booker shortlist has somehow passed me by, but longlisted Snowdrops interested me because it’s set in Russia and I’ve embarked on a bit of a Russian Readathon in preparation for my trip next year. However, I’m hoping that the author has taken a good deal of fictional licence with his setting, because it paints an alarming picture of post-Communist Moscow. (Ubiquitous drunken taxi-drivers, for a start!)

It’s a psychological thriller, quick and easy to read, though not quite unputdownable, I found. The central character is a rather dreary young English expat lawyer seduced by more than just the pretty Russian girls who chat him up one day on the Metro. In post-Stalinist Moscow, Nicholas Prat Platt sorts out contracts for major construction companies, and it’s no spoiler to alert you to the fact that the project he’s working on is corrupt, because any mildly competent reader will work that out in five minutes flat. We all know about corrupt Russian oligarchs anyway, right?

But the big giveaway is that Nicholas is confessing this unedifying tale to his new fiancée, and he very soon tells us more than enough to know that he’s done things he’s ashamed of. So the interest is only partly to do with what he’s done, with whom and how, but more importantly, the ‘why’. The author is interested in how easily people can lapse into moral turpitude if to start with they have no strong ethical background – or what we used to call a ‘conscience’. It’s probably no coincidence that the central character is a lawyer, though in the light of recent scandals in Britain it could just as easily have been a politician or a news executive…

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2011/10/07/sn...

[jeniwren · Rating 4 out of 5]

The setting for this novel is Russia, gloomy dark and covered in snow. The tone is menacing with a heady mix of corruption which begins with our protagonist Nicholas an English lawyer and a chance meeting with two 'predatory' women. This encounter sets in motion shady dealings with Nicholas slowly losing his grip on morality. Told as a confession to his future bride to be and as a means of gaining some insight into his amoral behaviour.

This is a fine debut and I was gripped from beginning to end. Very wry, witty and written in an engaging style. Recently longlisted for the Man Booker and deservedly so.

[Ruby Soames · Rating 5 out of 5]

This would have been my Man Booker Winner and it certainly cancels out the argument of whether you can be 'readable' and 'literary' at the same time. It's a psychological thriller which has depth and intrigue, narrated by the dupe of a crime and the spurned lover of a relationship. The 'Snowdrops' of the title refer to Stalin's murder victims whose bodies were revealed as the snows started to melt in the Spring, but it's also a metaphor for what is revealed about us when love begins to thaw and when we see others and ourselves as we really are. Effortless, beautiful, funny and unputdownable.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

One intersting piece of trivia: What we call Indian Summer they call Grandma's summer in Russia.