At the 1852 Christmas party hosted by Tsar Nicholas I, the plucky half-Chinese, half-Russian poet Sonja Sankova decks Peter "Colonel Cut" Koslov, who is infamous for his necklace of ears taken from serfs and Jews. In London that same night, American Jack Sandt, the Matthew Brady of Asia, conspires with Karl Marx to con the tsar into letting him take daguerreotype images inside Russia.So begins this immaculately researched, wildest of romantic wild rides, an odyssey of two lovers fleeing for their lives through the vast reaches of the Russian empire. The period details are splendid: a supper with Ivan Turgenev; a visit with the craftsmen who designed and cut gems for the Romanov tsars, a ball in a frontier town in the Urals, a glimpse of life inside the yurts of nomadic herdsmen.
