Vorab-Rezensenten

Description: "Stalin's Barber is all that the great historical novels used to be—epic in scope, with powerful characterizations, visceral action and a blazingly intelligent authorial point of view. Here we meet—and know—the chief players in the extraordinary centrifuge that was Stalin's Soviet Union. The culture is revealed and flayed; the lives are displayed and understood—this is ‘grand’ writing, in the sense of ‘grand’ opera, from a man who is already a master playwright, and now deserves to be a world figure." — Frank Delaney, author of Ireland: A Novel, a New York Times bestseller Avraham Bahar leaves debt-ridden and depressed Albania to seek a better life in, ironically, Stalinist Russia. A professional barber, he curries favor with the Communist regime, ultimately being invited to become Stalin’s personal barber at the Kremlin, where he is entitled to live in a government house with other Soviet dignitaries. In the intrigue that follows, Avraham, now known as Razan, is not only barber to Stalin but also to the many Stalin look-alikes that the paranoid dictator circulates to thwart possible assassination attempts—including one from Razan himself. Paul M. Levitt is professor of English at the University of Colorado and the author of several novels, plays, and works of literary criticism. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.