Cirrus@Austlit

'Powerful, densely rich and deeply affecting, The Tolstoy Estate shows Steven Conte to be one of our finest writers.

'From the winner of the inaugural Prime Minister's Literary Award

'In the first year of the doomed German invasion of Russia in WWII, a German military doctor, Paul Bauer, is assigned to establish a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana - the former grand estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the classic War and Peace. There he encounters a hostile aristocratic Russian woman, Katerina Trusbetzkaya, a writer who has been left in charge of the estate. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer's hostile and arrogant commanding officer, Julius Metz, starts becoming steadily more preoccupied and unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. Over the course of six weeks, in the terrible winter of 1941, everything starts to unravel...

'From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate is ambitious, accomplished and astonishingly good: an engrossing, intense and compelling exploration of the horror and brutality of conflict, and the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual limits that people reach in war time. It is also a poignant, bittersweet love story - and, most movingly, a novel that explores the notion that literature can still be a potent force for good in our world.' (Publication summary)

'It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo's director.

'Together, Vera and Axel struggle to look after the animals through the air raids and food shortages of war. When the zoo's staff are drafted into the army, conscripted foreign workers are sent to replace them. At first Vera finds the idea of forced labour abhorrent, but gradually she realises the new workers are the zoo's only hope. Then she finds herself becoming close to one of them - a young Czech, with whom she forms an unexpected bond.

'This is a city where a foreign accent - Czech or Australian - is a constant source of suspicion, where busybodies report the names of neighbours' dinner guests to the Gestapo. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing, and no one, it seems, can be trusted.' (Back cover)