The Breaking of Eggs
by Jim Powell

List Price: $15.00
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780143117261
Publisher: Penguin

A debut novel unwinds the tangle of 20th-century history with wit, humor, and humanity.

Sixty-one-year-old Feliks is a naturalized Frenchman, a displaced Pole and former Communist --- and a curmudgeon --- who has made his living writing a yearly travel guide to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. In 1991, with the Curtain now fallen, Feliks finds his beliefs beginning to crumble around him. When a rapacious American publisher offers to buy out his life's work, Feliks must travel to the country he has long despised, and so begins the wry and moving tale of a man who awakens from self-imposed isolation into a changed world he must get to know all over again. So unfolds a story of family, war, politics, a second chance at love, and one man's quest for himself.

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"Dramatic change comes to the rigidly ordered, solitary life of Feliks Zhukovski. A naturalized French citizen living in Paris, the irascible 61-year- old Polish leftist is stunned by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. He also gets the flu, and that spurs his first conversation in 36 years with his landlady. Feliks has always valued ideas and ideology over people, but events conspire to reunite him with the brother he hasn't seen for 50 years; take him to the hated U.S. to complete a business deal with capitalists (gasp!); discover the fate of his mother; and offer him a second chance at love. All of these events force Feliks to examine the choices he has made. Powell's delightful debut novel is by turns winsome and moving. Feliks is an indelible character, and the people who enter his life tell remarkable stories of the suffering that fascism and communism visited on Europe. The Breaking of Eggs is a book that thoughtful readers won't soon forget."

— Booklist