AustLit

The Memory Artist opens in 1999 when the narrator, Pasha, a young Russian writer, hears his mother has died. Pasha is a child of dissidents who grew up in Moscow amid secret gatherings as his mother and her friends campaigned for the release of political prisoners during the Brezhnev era. During his childhood the "shiny mint-green Latvian radio" on the kitchen table, with its broadcasts from the BBC or Voice of America, was a beacon in an otherwise grey world. ...'