The First Circle Author:Alexander Solzhenitsyn " A book of great sadness with deep veins of humor... It is at once classic and contemporary. Reading it, we know that it has been with us for years just as we know the future generations will read it with wonder and with awe" - Thomas Lask, New York Times — "Very impressive. Twenty years ago Koestler gave us his theatrically conceptualized accou... more »nt of Stalinism and the purges in Darkness at Noon; Solzhenitzyn makes the subject more spacious, and, as a real novelist must, places it in the lives of men and women. He shows the lives out of which opinion has grown. In the latest novel, The First Circle, he is quietly in command of powers that are scattered and now, like the great novelists, can control a beautifully orchestrated theme." - V.S. Pritchett, New York Review of Books« less