John Schwartz - The Red Daughter

My thanks to all, and many more. One writes alone but never in a vacuum: my wife, Aleksandra, and son, Garrick (and my dog, Griffin, too) are my constant guarantors of this truth, for which I am forever grateful. Onward, with love.

FOR MY FATHER

One day in the spring of my last year of college, I took the train down from Boston to meet the literary agent Binky Urban in New York for the first time. Binky had read a hundred pages of fiction I’d written about a young man living in Japan and had sent me an encouraging note. I very much doubt that she expected me to arrive at her office in person later that week. But arrive I did. And she has been by my side, and had my back, ever since. She has my profound gratitude and deepest affection.

My extraordinary editor, Susanna Porter, arrived in my life when I most needed her, just as I was finishing the first draft of The Red Daughter, and with patient wisdom and miraculous grace guided me through the many further drafts that it required. Susanna is that rare thing: a teller of hard truths whom one always looks forward to hearing from. I was, and am, so excited and thankful to be working with her.

My thanks also to David Ebershoff, whose comments about The Red Daughter in its early stages showed the fine perceptiveness mixed with clear-eyed literary ruthlessness that have made him not only a wonderful editor but the excellent novelist that he is.

Finally, a team of very talented people at Random House took my final draft of this novel and turned it into the published book it is today: Emily Hartley in editorial; Carrie Neill, Melissa Sanford, and Katie Tull in publicity and marketing; Paolo Pepe, who designed such a stirring cover; Debbie Glasserman, Kelly Chian, and Susan Brown, who added their skills in text design, production editorial, and copyediting respectively; and, in the publisher’s office, Avideh Bashirrad, Susan Kamil, and Andy Ward. My sincere thanks to all.

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The Red Daughter

JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ is the author of five acclaimed novels, including The Commoner, Northwest Corner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and he has done extensive screen and television writing, including as screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, for which he was nominated for a 2018 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Writing. He is literary director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son, Garrick.

The Red Daughter is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by John Burnham Schwartz

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents for permission to reprint “Everything is Plundered…” from Poems of Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward (Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997), copyright © 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Schwartz, John Burnham, author.

Title: The red daughter: a novel / John Burnham Schwartz.

Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018040604 | ISBN 9781400068463 (hardback) | ISBN 9781984853875 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Allilueva, Svetlana, 1926–2011—Fiction. | Children of heads of state—Soviet Union—Fiction. | Defectors—United States—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Biographical. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3569.C5658 R43 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018040604

Ebook ISBN 9781984853875

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

Cover photograph: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

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