NATIONAL BESTSELLER - An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel set in 1946, starring two brothers and a Jewish girl who fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow--from "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation" (Time)."A bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history's most harrowing chapters." --The New York Times The brothers' fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.