Changes

|title=Brief Loves That Live Forever

|author=Andrei Makine

|publisher=MacLehose Press

|date=April 2014

|summary=A set of linked stories – wrapped in a short novel's plot, perhaps – that warmly focuses on love in the hearts and minds of those brought up under Communism.

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Our unnamed narrator is inspired to think back through his life on the girls and women he has been in love with, partly because of a time spent with an associate – a time marked by a seemingly most unremarkable encounter with a further woman – whom he deemed had never been loved. The associate, you see, had spent half his adult life in Soviet camps for political instruction – our narrator himself was an orphan in the 1960s' Soviet Union. This snappy volume takes us through episodes in several lives at different points during and since the second half of communist rule – and finally explains the import of that unremarkable encounter…