A NOVEL OF RUSSIA！New Year's Day, 1906. A family celebrates, skating on the ice of a vast lake in front of a mediaeval castle, far in the north of Russia;cousins of the Romanov Tsars, these are the Rumovskies - Prince Pyotr;his wife Princess Sofia; their son Ivan and twins Yelena and Alexander;and their young Irish governess, Miss Harriet. With them is the patriarch of the family, old Prince Mikhail, a strange, towering figure,a man from another century, with his fabulous Boyars'court at the castle, a Tamburlaine of the snows...

New Year"s Day, 1906. A family celebrates, skating on the ice of a vast lake in front of a mediaeval castle, far in the north of Russia;cousins of the Romanov Tsars, these are the Rumovskies - Prince Pyotr;his wife Princess Sofia; their son Ivan and twins Yelena and Alexander;and their young Irish governess, Miss Harriet. With them is the patriarch of the family, old Prince Mikhail, a strange, towering figure,a man from another century, with his fabulous Boyars"court at the castle, a Tamburlaine of the snows...

Behind the Rumovsky family lie 300 years of autocratic but peaceful rule. Ahead of them, the old prince expects the same for his descendants, ltis not to be.Firesong is the story of the Rumovsky descendants: a novel of love in all its surprising variety and of Russia in all its splendours and miseries.A story both intimate and epic, there are echoes of Dr Zhivago in this dramatic saga, as men and women fight for their destinies, in love and peace, against all the odds of war and dissolution.

Book One: 1906-1915

Book Two: 1918   

Book Three: 1918-1919

Book Four: 1919-1920  

Epilogue: Christmas 1920