A Stolen Past

For Allan Prieston, his years at Yale are the prelude to a future as a writer, encouraged by his friendship with Reeves Lockhart, the world-famed novelist and playwright. For Allan's roommate, Gregory Trouvenskoy, heir to a ghostly rank, privilege, and wealth, the future is an enigma that can only be happily resolved if Merry Carr, heiress to a great fortune, agrees to marry him. For Gregory's parents, Prince Alexei and Princess Zinaida, living in exile and genteel near-poverty in a faded mansion on the Hudson, the future is a pale shadow, measured against the past they had known in Imperial Russia. This divergent sextet---the young and the old, American and Europeans, bound together in an intimacy they only half recognize---are caught up in a drama of increasing excitement as it moves between the present and the ambiguities of the past. Its climax, the theft of a diamond on which the elder Trouvenskoys' survival literally depends, is a turning point in the lives of them all, at once shocking and inevitable. Written with the immediacy, clarity, and haunting overtones that have long been characteristic of its author, A STOLEN PAST is a novel of classic stature.