Inspired by the infamous 52-year marriage of literary couple Véra and Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Bonfire (Bloomsbury, 2018) is the second novel by Adrienne Celt ’06. In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country’s paranoia about Russian spies.
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