Publisher's Synopsis
"A rich, immersive debut novel, inspired by true events, about a meeting between two women in 1970s Soviet Russia-a deeply religious homesteader living in isolation with her family on the Siberian taiga and an ambitious scientist-that irrevocably changes the course of both of their lives. Galina, a promising young geologist from Moscow, is falling in love with her pilot, Snow Crane, on a trip exploring for minerals in Siberia. As their helicopter hovers over what should be a stretch of uninhabited forest, they see a small hut and a garden-and, the following day, when they hike from their field camp to the hut, they find a family. Agafia was born in Siberia into a family of Old Believers, a small sect of Christians who rejected the reforms that shaped the modern Russian Orthodox church. Her parents fled religious persecution four decades earlier, hiking deep into the snowy wilderness and eventually building a home far away from the dange
