rief Loves That Live Forever is a novel in eight chapters, each of which are distinct episodes in the life of the narrator. The chapters show us moments of supreme lucidity where the narrator is consciously alive to the beauty of the world and the possibility of love in its many aspects. The setting is the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union where as the narrator states, “love is in essence subversive.”

 
 
The essence of this novel is how to move beyond recrimination of the past or even the promise of the future and to be consciously alive to the beauty around us, and to that possibility of love. Andreï Makine is an elegant stylist who allows us to witness these clear moments throughout this moving and thoughtful novel.

 
 
Andreï Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 and has lived in France since 1987 when he traveled there as a member of a teacher’s exchange program. He determined to stay in France and was granted political asylum. Writing in his adopted language, he is the author of over twenty novels and has won France’s top literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. In 2016 Makine was elected to the prestigious Académie française, succeeding Assia Djebar.

 
 
Geoffrey Strachan has worked closely with Andreï Makine, translating all of the novels published in English. Strachan was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1998 for his translation of Makine’s Le testament français. Strachan was shortlisted for the Moncrieff Prize for Makine’s The Archipelago of Another Life in 2020 and for Tropic of Violence by Nathacha Appanah in 2019. In 2007 he was a runner up for The Woman Who Waited by Makine. Strachan also translates from German and has won the Schlegel-Tieck award in 1973 for Love and Hate by Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt.

 
 
Vladimir Zimakov is an illustrator, book artist and designer. He is an associate professor of art and design and the director of the Wedeman Art Gallery at Lasell University in Massachusetts. Zimakov has worked with leading publishing houses such as Penguin, Random House, Faber and Faber, Oxford University Press, the Folio Society illustrating books and producing cover art. He has also worked with Mad Parrot Press/Deep Wood Press, Centipede Press and publishes under the Wild Pangolin Press imprint.