The Beginning of Spring, by Penelope Fitzgerald

[MN]

I read this for 2019 ATY topic 39: a book with a strong sense of place or where the author brings the location/setting to life. I always enjoy - more than enjoy - Fitzgeralds writing and this certainly didn't disappoint. Here's the GR synopsis:
In March 1913, Frank Reid's wife abruptly leaves him and Moscow for her native England. Naturally, she takes their daughters and son with her. The children, however, only make it as far as the train station - and even after returning home remain unaffected by their brief exile.

"They ought either to be quieter or more noisy than before," their father thinks, "and it was disconcerting that they seemed to be exactly the same." Frank's routines, however, drift into disorder as he tries desperately to take charge of life at home and work. Even his printing plant is suddenly confronted by the specters of modernization and utter instability.

In Penelope Fitzgerald's fiction, affection and remorse are all too often allied, and desire and design seem never to meet. Frank wants little more than a quiet, confident life - something for which he is deeply unsuited, and which Russia certainly will not go out of her way to provide.

'The Beginning of Spring' is filled with echoes of past wrongs and whispers of the revolution to come, even if the author evokes these with abrupt comic brio. ...

I loved this book for the complexity, and hence unpredictability, of its characters, for the detailed descriptions of the city, and for its humour.