FREE: YOUR MOUTH IS LOVELY BY NANCY RICHLER (2002, Hardcover)

The listing, YOUR MOUTH IS LOVELY BY NANCY RICHLER (2002, Hardcover) has ended.

This epic is set in Russia as the 20th century is about to turn, and tells the story of Miriam, falsely accused of murder, who writes a letter to her daughter to explain the truth.

"Each winter I'm sure will be my last. Dust to dust, I find myself saying as my frozen fingers struggle to hold the pen with which I write these words to you, Ashes to ashes, I mutter, and nothing but suffering and joy in between. I've had my share. Hot and sharp -- I taste it still in the blood that fills my mouth when I cough."

Miriam is a 19 year old imprisoned in Siberia following the Russian Revolution of 1905. Reaching out to the young daughter whom she gave up at birth, Miriam weaves a haunting tale of life in a small Jewish village during the last days of imperial Russia and of a community caught between the rich yet rigid traditions of the past and the frightening, unfamiliar ways of a society desperately trying to reinvent itself.

Rejected by her suicidal mother and abandoned by her father at birth, Miriam is marked as an outcast in her village from the beginning. Reunited with her father when he marries Tsila, a haughty and complex woman whose beauty has been marred by the hand of divine anger, Miriam searches to unveil the secrets of her birth in a place of mystery and superstition, where everyone seems to know the truth that eludes her.

Your Mouth Is Lovely moves seamlessly from picturesque but impoverished villages, where fife is ruled by the iron hand of God and the equally powerful grip of Fate, to the slums of teeming Kiev, where a seething anger is about to change the course of Russian history. A story of epic human drama, Your Mouth Is Lovely is a poetic, dreamy novel with a darkly magical sheen.