One of my favorite books this year is The Long Hangover: Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past by Shaun Walker (Oxford University Press), the Guardian's central and eastern Europe correspondent.
Agent: Kim Lionetti, BookEnds Literary.I've been "reading Russia" since first encountering the classics (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin) and then the contemporaries (Solzhenitsyn, Akhmatova) in the mid-20th century, during my ancient college years. The diverse cast and exceptional writing take this romance to the next level, and readers who see themselves in Stella will be ecstatic.
Hoang carefully avoids stereotypes and clichés: Stella never judges Michael for his profession, and he never judges her for her neuroatypicality. The two of them do a beautiful job of navigating their insecurities and fears, transforming their commercial relationship into something emotionally meaningful to them both. While Stella’s intentions toward Michael start out as purely sexual, his gentleness and compassion begin to nudge her in more romantic directions, and his sense of honor, along with her tendency toward obsession, soon complicate their tidy professional arrangement. Stella’s autism is presented as both a genuine challenge and a part of her that she knows how to use to her advantage, and Hoang gives her tremendous depth as a character, never reducing her to a walking diagnosis. Stella is great at her job creating predictive algorithms, but she’s not so great at relationships, which is why she decides to hire escort Michael.
Hoang knocks it out of the park with this stellar debut about an autistic woman who takes a methodical approach to learning about sex and accidentally gets a lesson in love.
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