'Georgia, a picturesque nation squeezed between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, was once considered a wine-soaked playground for the Soviet upper crust. This multigenerational epic, framed as a gift from the embittered narrator, Niza, to her wayward niece, provides a more nuanced view. It begins with Niza's bourgeois great-grandmother, whose dream of becoming a ballerina is derailed by Lenin's revolution. Her descendants are likewise transformed by upheavals of the twentieth century: Stalinist purges, the Second World War, the Prague Spring, Georgia's independence, and the subsequent civil war. Through these events, the novel offers not only a critique of Soviet and Russian imperial ambitions but a necessary reappraisal of Georgian history.'.