Snowdrops

British journalist Andrew Miller spent several years in Moscow in the mid-2000s working as a correspondent for The Economist. This experience became the foundation of his debut novel “Snowdrops,” which made it onto the shortlist for the 2011 British Booker Prize.

Formally, it is a psychological thriller: the main character, a lawyer who has fallen in love with Moscow, finds himself at the center of a fraud that is extremely complex for a foreigner and, to all of us, painfully understandable—real estate corruption. But in reality, this is a novel about Moscow—an admission of love to it—and a portrait of Russia seen by a slightly naive and romantic foreigner.

Andrew Miller’s hero tries to understand how ordinary people live in Russia. The lives of oil tycoons and regulars at strip clubs he already knows better than he would like. In front of the hero of “Snowdrops,” crimes occur that he would like to forget, but they surface in his memory again and again after he returns home, constantly making him wonder what role he played in them.

The writer reflects on how Russia became a test of character for the character he invented.

This book isn’t only about Russia. Of course, it’s about Russia too, and I hope I managed to convey the atmosphere that prevailed in Moscow in the years covered by the story. But the ultimate goal wasn’t that. I set out not to write about corruption and immorality in Russia, but about corruption and immorality that are inherent in people in general.
E.D. Miller