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SNOWDROPS (AUDIO)
by A D Miller, read by Kevin Howarth
Whole Story Audio Books, March 2012
Unabridged pages
20.41 GBP
ISBN: 1407471503


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Aside from being the cute little flower, a snowdrop has a more sinister meaning in Moscow – it's a corpse that appears once the snows melt. And there's ice and Arctic temperatures aplenty in SNOWDROPS.

Nick Platt, is a 38-year-old lawyer who's moved from Luton to Moscow. He stops a mugging in the underground and finds himself drawn to the almost-victim Masha and her sister Katya.

It's a fairly desultory affair. Nick isn't exactly Mr Energetic, and Masha is a strong-minded woman with a life of her own. So he goes along with whatever she suggests, including staying at a dacha, spending a few days in Yalta and meeting her aunt, who is making plans to downsize from her faded-grandeur city apartment to a new flat on the outskirts which overlooks countryside. And he also isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, so it takes a while for him to twig what's happening.

SNOWDROPS is constructed as a letter after all the events to Nick's wife-to-be. It's over-heavy on the 'had I but known' school of lack of suspense – a techniques which always causes me to bawl 'get on with it!' at the writer. And there's an over-riding temptation to drop the future Mrs P a note and suggest she finds herself a brighter bloke with some backbone …

Plot-wise, the book is a ponderous, linear plod – and the ending doesn't come as any surprise. You'll almost certainly be well ahead of the game and reclining with wine and chocolates well before Nick drifts past the finishing line.

The only reason to keep reading/listening is for the mirror on a rapidly-changing country. Nick moves from the shabby apartment blocks of Moscow to dodgy nightclubs to the ambitious new developments in the hinterlands of Russia. Where A D Miller does excel is in his descriptions of the people Nick meets – elderly Russians who have learned to adapt to whatever life has thrown at them, pushy youngsters looking West and the shady operators like the Cossack who know that money really can buy you anything in modern Russia.

My early impressions of the narrator Kevin Howarth were of reverentially hushed tones. But he paces a one-dimensional book well (I must admit to being surprised to discover that something so shallow was nominated for the Booker prize), and throws in Russian accents without sounding like a refugee from a bad 1970s Cold War movie.

As a snapshot of life in a rapidly-changing country and of how expats adapt to their strange existence, SNOWDROPS has much to commend it. As a suspense novel, though, it's pretty much dead in the water.

§ Sharon Wheeler is a UK-based journalist, writer and lecturer.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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