The Tolstoy Estate By Steven Conte
About Steven Conte
Steven Conte’s debut novel, The Zookeeper’s War, won the inaugural Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and for the 2007 Christina Stead Award for Fiction. The novel was published in the UK and Ireland and translated into Spanish. For further information, visit Steven’s website.
A Quote from Steven Conte
“Due to some recent work on my Italian, the word that springs to mind at the news of The Tolstoy Estate’s longlisting for the ARA Prize is “splendido!” Bravo Edward Federman and the team at ARA for sponsoring such a generous award, as well as the HNSA for its support of great antipodean literature.”
About The Tolstoy Estate
In the first year of the doomed German invasion of Russia in WWII, a German military doctor, Paul Bauer, is assigned to establish a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana – the former grand estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the classic War and Peace. There he encounters a hostile aristocratic Russian woman, Katerina Trubetzkaya, a writer who has been left in charge of the estate. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer’s hostile and arrogant commanding officer, Julius Metz, becomes erratic and unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. Over the course of six weeks, in the terrible winter of 1941, everything starts to unravel…
