In a Land Without Dogs the Cats Learn To Bark

DEBUT Award-winning Canadian playwright Garfinkel (House of Many Tongues) fuses Georgian arts, politics, and history into a riveting thriller. With the 2003 Rose Revolution as its flickering nucleus, this ambitious novel delves into events in the Republic of Georgia. Energized by passions for power, vengeance, and that old black magic called love, a platoon of colorful characters battles Soviet dominion and old traditions. Satire, double identity, double-crosses, pleasure, and violent death characterize the plot of this exploration of loyalty, conscience, and hope. The book opens with high jinks at Moscow University in 1974, as an American joins Georgian students in a subversive literary collective. It attracts the KGB but its target, Anna Litvak, the group’s femme fatale, disappears. Eventually just as the USSR is collapsing, she arrives in Tbilisi under a new identity as a pro-democracy activist. Her two adult children, having never met, emerge in Georgia to carry on her legacy, with astonishing results.