BGS is pleased to host the London book launch of Anthea Nicholson’s debut novel ‘BGS is pleased to host the book launch of Anthea Nicholson’s debut novel ‘The Banner of the Passing Clouds’ on Thursday, April 25 at 7.00pm, at the Georgian Embassy, 4 Russell Gardens, London, W14 8EZ, just two weeks after its official publication by Granta.

The publisher, Philip Gwyn Jones, will give a short introduction, after which Anthea Nicholson will be reading extracts from her book. Good home-made Georgian wine and Georgian snacks will be provided afterwards.

Anthea Nicholson is a writer and visual artist who lives between England and Tbilisi in Georgia.

RSVP to info@britishgeorgiansociety.org

Anthea Nicholson’s The Banner of the Passing Clouds gives an extraordinary insight into living under communism in Georgia before independence and vividly describes life in Tbilisi. Its narrator, who is born on the day Stalin dies, is given Stalin’s name by hospital nurses – Iosif Dzhugashvili. When Iosif learns of his strange link to the ‘man of steel’, he becomes convinced that Stalin has found a new dwelling place within his chest, a burden he both welcomes and fears.  In Iosif, Nicholson has created a unique and compelling narrator: a victim of the regime, which dictates all aspects of his and his family’s life, who is also complicit in its ideology and practises. As an unquestioning citizen of communism, he is disconcertingly meddlesome, yet he remains a curiously pathetic and moving figure. It is only when Iosif unwittingly destroys his family’s happiness that some kind of redemption for him is possible.

‘The Banner of the Passing Clouds is marked by an almost uncanny insight into its historical time and place. All is rendered with poignant clarity. There is a deep and hard-won compassion at work in this book, a compassion that is a kind of wisdom’ Anne Michaels, author, Fugitive Pieces

‘Nicholson is a writer of extraordinary lyrical gifts. The Banner of the Passing Clouds is gripping and profoundly moving’ Gerard Woodward

‘A tale that suggests how naked we are when the mighty ideologies around us fall… manages to be at once epic and claustrophobic, and, above all, entrancing’ Samantha Harvey, author, Wilderness