Tatiana and Alexander (65 page)

Authors: Paullina Simons

Tags: #Historical Fiction, #Saint Petersburg (Russia) - History - Siege; 1941-1944, #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General, #Love Stories, #Europe, #Americans - Soviet Union, #Russians, #Soviet Union - History - 1925-1953, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Soviet Union, #Fantasy, #New York, #Americans, #Russians - New York (State) - New York, #New York (State), #History

BOOK: Tatiana and Alexander

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful and overdue thanks:

To Larry Brantley, the voice of the Army, for the hours spent detailing for me things I could never have known.

To Tracy Brantley, his wife and my true friend, who in a very amigo-like fashion, gave me early on what I needed most by weeping in all the right places and loving Tania and Shura for all the right reasons.

To Irene Simons, my first mother-in-law, for giving me the name under which I write my books.

To Elaine Ryan, my second mother-in-law, for giving me her perfect second son.

To Radik Tikhomirov, my father’s friend for sixty years, for photocopying diaries of blockade survivors at the St. Petersburg library and sending me hundreds of pages in original Russian.

To Robert Gottlieb, a fellow Russophile, for performing miracles, and to Kim Whalen for a decade of hard work.

To Nick Sayers, my former publisher, my editor, my friend.

To Pavla Salacova who works so hard making my life easier she makes me believe she has twenty hands.

To my second and last husband Kevin—you are the bomb.

And to my father, who, a long time ago, hoped and believed and loved, and brought his family to the promised land for a free life.

About the Author

PAULLINA SIMONS
is the bestselling author of the acclaimed novels
Tully, Red Leaves,
and
Eleven Hours.
Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, she has lived in Rome, London, and Dallas, and currently lives near New York City with her husband and four children.

www.paullinasimons.com

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Praise
for
Tatiana and Alexander

“This has everything a romance glutton could wish for: a bold, talented, and dashing hero, a heart-stopping love affair! It also has—thank goodness—a welcome sense of humor and discernable characters rather than ciphers.”

—
Daily Mail
(London)

“A story of love and hope in the grand Russian tradition; a sort of Second World War
War and Peace
, vast, epic, sweeping.”

—
Bookseller
(London)

Praise for
The Bronze Horseman

“Lush in emotion and rich in detail…a complex, diverse, multi-faceted story.”

—Denver Post

“Readers will come to care about these characters and their plight and will take away a definite sense of what the siege of Leningrad actually meant on a personal level.”

—Booklist

“Emotionally compelling…a page-turner.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A love story both tender and fierce.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Recalls
Dr. Zhivago
.”

—People

“A heart-stopping love story.”

—Library Journal

Praise for
Tully

“Reads fast, like a sudden surge of wind over the plains, and the book’s momentum builds to tornado force.”

—USA Today

“A big, ambitious book whose characters stick in the reader’s mind.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“What a lovely and resonant evocation of that first great bond between women—it’s deeply moving.”

—Anne Rivers Siddons

Also by Paullina Simons

R
OAD TO
P
ARADISE

T
HE
G
IRL IN
T
IMES
S
QUARE

T
HE
S
UMMER
G
ARDEN

T
HE
B
RONZE
H
ORSEMAN

E
LEVEN
H
OURS

R
ED
L
EAVES

T
ULLY

Cookbook:

T
ATIANA’S
T
ABLE

Credits

Cover design by Feeza Mumtaz

Cover photograph © Allan Jenkins/Trevillion Images

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

TATIANA AND ALEXANDER
. Copyright © 2003 by Paullina Simons. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

F
IRST
A
VON PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED
2010.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ePub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-202025-3

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