Whether she’s studying Uzbek in Samarkand or attending a Tolstoy conference as Yasnaya Polyana, she has a gift for meeting oddballs and delighting in absurdities, which makes for a fascinating, digressive, arrestingly peculiar book.

It sounds great.

This one, for instance - a romance between a mother with grown children and a man rebuilding a life after years away in the war - has a very gentle atmosphere, but the losses and hardships of the war hang in the background.

This also sounds great! I have never read any D.E. Stevenson. I shall have to see where I can find some.