Cape of Storms

First edition in English. Sm. 8vo. Pp. [xiii], 244, [4 (blank)]. Purple linen cloth boards, lettered in silver to spine; pale mauve endpapers. Jacket illustration detail from Composition VI, 1913, by Wassily Kandinsky, Hermitage, St. Petersburg; design by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance.

Translated from the original Russian Мыс Штормов, by Marian Schwartz. Originally published in the Russian émigré journal Novyi Zhurnal (Новый Журнал, "The New Review"), nos. 24–27, 1951. It was founded in New York in 1942, by Mark Aldanov and Mikhail Tsetlin, as a successor to the Paris-based Sovremennye zapiski (Современные записки, "Contemporary Papers").

A New York Times Notable Book of 1998. A riveting novella centring on three half-sisters, Russian-born but Paris-raised, whose childhood traumas mark them for life. The first volume in her great trilogy of Cape of Storms, The Book of Happiness, and The Ladies from St. Petersburg, about Russian ex-patriates displaced by the Revolution, all penned during her years of exile in Paris.

"Discovered" in the 1980s by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis whilst working as an editor at Viking and Doubleday, when she chanced upon French volumes by Actes Sud of Berberova's fiction. Banished by Lenin in 1922, together with her poet husband, Vladislav Khodasevich, Berberova used fiction to chronicle her experience of exile. However, in these novels the émigré experience recedes and an exploration of feminist and humanist themes takes precedence. "Gogol's, Tolstoy's and especially Chekhov's most vital inheritor." –Boston Review