Kolkhoz

A personal history of war, obsession, love and truth by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of The Adversary

Standing among the mourners gathered to honour Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – renowned historian of Russia, member of the Académie Française, national figure – her son, Emmanuel Carrère, wonders who this formidable woman was: to the country, to history and to himself.

In Kolkhoz, Carrère turns his unflinching gaze on his own lineage, crafting his most intimate and ambitious book yet. Spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, and up to the war in Ukraine, he traces the destinies of a family scattered by revolution, ideology and pride. There are White Russian ancestors clinging to vanished grandeur; relatives lured back to Stalin’s USSR and swallowed by silence; a father obsessed with genealogy and lost nobility; and, at the centre, a mother whose brilliance, ambition and dominance shaped both French intellectual life and her son’s inner world.

As Carrère sifts through letters, archives and contested memories, he confronts the stories families tell to survive and the lies they tell to protect one another and asks: how do political faith and historical catastrophe reverberate across generations? And can a son write about his mother with honesty without betraying her? At once sweeping and surgical, tender and unsparing, Kolkhoz is a family epic and a reckoning: a meditation on communism and its afterlives, on filial piety and rebellion, and on the uneasy border between truth and love.

WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDICIS

PRAISE FOR EMMANUEL CARRÈRE

'A superstar writer' Guardian

'One of the best storytellers around' Evening Standard

'The most exciting living writer' Karl Ove Knausgaard