The novel is told from the first-person perspective and tells the fictional story of a boy's memories and experiences with his French grandmother in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s.

Charlotte Lemonnier, also known in Russian as Sharlota Norbertovna, is the heroine of the story, born in France in the early 1900s in the village of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Although she is present in the beginning of the novel accompanying her brother in their visits to Charlotte, she later goes to study in Moscow and is no longer mentioned.

He dies in World War I. Fyodor is Charlotte's Russian husband, who marries her roughly a year after Albertine's death.

She is strong, resourceful, and instrumental in showing the young boy the "true" Russia - bitter, violent, and proud.

The book opens with the narrator leafing through photographs of old relatives in his grandmother's house in Saranza, a fictional Russian town on the border of the steppe.

The movement between Charlotte's French past and the Soviet present causes conflict in the boy's identity as the novel explores both sides of his heritage.

The town is a strange mixture of these old relics and the new regime's style that discards any excess or superfluous design, showcasing the theme of the clash between past and present.

After the death of her father Norbert, her widowed mother Albertine becomes unstable, making visits to Paris only to insist on returning to Russia.

Young Charlotte, roughly age nine, begins to give French lessons to the Governor of Boyarsk's daughter.

But in July 1914, when Charlotte is eleven, Albertine temporarily goes back to Siberia, to put an end to her Siberian life.

Time jumps ahead to 1921, when Charlotte, now a young woman, is chosen to go to Russia as a Red Cross nurse, because she can speak both French and Russian.

Years pass with only the description of wartime hardship and the images of the countless mutilated soldiers that fall under Charlotte's care.

Charlotte decides to return to the town of her childhood, Boyarsk, to see the fate of the izba where she and her mother once lived.

Coming back to the present, the children listen to more of Charlotte's dreamy stories of France through her "Siberian suitcase" filled with newspaper clippings.

Fyodor was dressed in the red outfit of Father Christmas to entertain his children on New Year's Eve when he was arrested.

One week later, he goes to Moscow supposedly temporarily, in order to be reinstated into the Party, however Charlotte never sees him again until four years later, after the war.

In the midst of this constant presence of dying soldiers, Charlotte receives a letter informing her of Fyodor's death on the front.

On a walk outside the town, she addresses the narrator as "Alyosha" and tells him that even after all of her years in Russia, she still can't seem to understand her adopted country; its harshness still seems foreign.

As the narrator walks back to Saranza with his grandmother, he feels as though the Russian and French within him now live in peace, put to rest by Charlotte's words.

It was the rape that produced the narrator's Uncle Sergei, but Charlotte explains that she and Fyodor loved and accepted him as their first-born son.

One day, he comes down with a fever and drifts in and out of reality, eventually making a temporary home inside a family tomb in a cemetery.

After feverishly wondering like a madman through Paris, he collapses by the river and sees a plaque inscribed with the words "Flood Level - January 1910".

This plaque brings back a flood of memories of France and his Russian summers, but most importantly, it reminds him of Charlotte.

His first works sat unsold because he wrote them in French, which prompted the critics to reject them as a Russian immigrant's attempt to use their language.

As soon as he applies for the passport, he decides that in order to welcome Charlotte to France he must decorate his apartment with antiques that might make her feel more at home.

His grandmother had actually died only a few short weeks after Alex Bond had visited her, meaning that everything the narrator did, everything he bought was in vain.

His thoughts drift to Charlotte's presence filling the streets of Paris as he searches for the words to tell her story.

Emer Duff of The Dublin Quarterly International Literary Review said that the novel, "reads like an autobiography and one suspects that many of the beautifully drawn characters are perhaps people from Makine's own life.

As Victor Brombert said in the New York Times, "It is therefore ironic that in order to have his first books published in Paris he had to pretend they were translations from Russian manuscripts.