Showing results by narrator "John Hosking" in All Categories

Andrey enters his final year of medical studies in 1854 with an empty belly, empty pockets, and secondhand clothes hanging together by wishful thinking. When Russia blunders into the misbegotten Crimean War, Tsar Nicholas recruits medical students to the front, and Andrey grabs at this flash of good luck. But his sanity is soon tested as he is forced to witness the most senseless and utter disregard for human life imaginable - where the death of a man holds no more significance than the death of a beetle.

Jane Marlow's debut novel is a beautifully written 25-year saga of two families - one born of noble heritage and the other bound as serfs to the noble's household. Set during the mid-1800s in the vast grain fields of Russia, Who Is to Blame? follows the lives of two star-crossed serfs, Elizaveta and Feodor, torn apart by their own families and the church while simultaneously trapped in the inhumane life of poverty to which they were born.