THE COLLECTOR OF LISTS

• 15,000 copies sold!

Sofia doesn’t know if she’s coming or going. She still doesn’t feel comfortable in her role as a mother, her own, annoyingly fussy mother is more of a hindrance than a help and her elderly grandmother is already suffering from dementia. But Sofia’s foible for creating lists saves her sanity: the most embarrassing pet names, the funniest neuroses, the worst restaurants. Her lists bring a semblance of structure to her life. One day she makes an intriguing discovery in her grandmother’s flat: a collection of lists written in Cyrillic script on musty, yellowed paper. Not so surprising, seeing as the family left the Soviet Union in the 1970s. But the find leads Sofia to an uncle no one in her family ever talked about, the mysterious Uncle Grischa, a weird old man who was a member of the underground resistance, endangered the entire family and yet was still loved by everyone around him. Using clues supplied by the lists, she unearths Grischa’s murky past, and finds that history can have a powerful effect on the present.

A heart-warming, funny book about family and family life, populated by engagingly quirky characters that pull us in from the first page.