She is a legend throughout Europe: the most dazzling star to dance with the Russian Imperial Ballet; a beauty who enchanted power brokers, including the last tsar, her beloved Nicholas II; a shrewd survivor who escaped the revolution with her jewels and her dignity intact, living out her days in the comfort of French society. Now, at the age of 99, she has decided to record an intimate account of her mythic life, revealing once and for all the paternity of her son and taking readers to a lost world of untold grandeur. She is Mathilde Kschessinska, the narrator of Adrienne Sharp’s haunting novel, which captures the crescendo and horrific coda of the Romanov dynasty.

Inspired by the true Mathilde Kschessinska, Sharp’s fictional account brims with intriguing what-ifs, reimagining an astonishingly gifted young girl and her spectacular rise in an era when art and aristocracy produced a level of opulence never to be matched. Sharp brings sparkling insight to this epic tale of love and survival.