Viking Penguin 2005

Olga's Story

Olga Yunter was born in the summer of 1900 in a remote trading post surrounded by the desolate steppe of southern Siberia. The youngest of five children, she was brought up enjoying great family banquets at Easter; horse fairs across the border in outer Mongolia; the arrival of her father’s caravans, that had journeyed from the northern reaches of Siberia, weighed down with the furs of foxes and sable.

Olga is fifteen when mutterings of rebellion are heard in the streets. She is swept up in the chaos of the Russian Revolution, as she helps her brothers in their desperate fight to save their town first from the Bolsheviks, and then from the brutal commander of the region’s White forces. Violent tragedy ensues.

With a price on her head, Olga flees for her life. At nineteen, alone and with only a handful of rubies sewn into her petticoats she escapes, first to Vladivostok and then to northern China. She never saw her family in Siberia again.

Based on Olga’s own stories, scraps of notebooks and letters, and painstaking research, Olga’s Story is the heart-rending account of the life of the author’s grandmother.

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Reviews

'An epic tale: the dramatic and poignant story of an ordinary woman of extraordinary resilience caught up in some of the most devastating events of the last century.‘

BBC Book of the Week, April 2005

'As good as Dr Zhivago. One of the treats of terrific literature is how it opens the doors to worlds we knew nothing about. Williams bring[s] to vibrant life the world of the middle- and upper-class Russians in Siberian towns’ Jonathan Mirsky, Spectator

‘Vivid and enthralling, brilliant and entrancing, well written and passionately researched. Reads like a novel’

Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times

‘A heartbreaking story of disaster and survival through some of the worst conflicts and upheavals of our benighted age. Moving and brilliant.’

Sunday Telegraph

'In recreating Olga's Story, Stephanie Williams has managed to do something I would have thought impossible: she has given us a new vantage point from which to view the turbulent and often hellish years of the first half of the twentieth century. A beautifully written and subtly crafted book.'

Jonathan Spence, Yale University, author of The Death of Woman Wang and The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.

‘A gripping and authentic narrative of a life that was at once ordinary and remarkable’

The Times Literary Supplement