Searingly hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter, the ancestral estate of the Golovlyov family is the end of the road. There Anna Petrovna rules with an iron hand over her servants and family-until she loses power to the relentless scheming of her hypocritical son Judas.
One of the great books of Russian literature, The Golovlyov Family is a vivid picture of a condemned and isolated outpost of civilization that, for contemporary readers, will recall the otherwordly reality of Macondo in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov, pen-name Shchedrin, (1826-1889) is known as Russia’s greatest satirist. Born into the landed gentry, he worked as a civil servant while writing and editing for radical journals. Though he was exiled for seven years, he maintained an unflagging attack on Russia’s social institutions, the new bourgeois capitalists, and the cowardice of the educated classes. Shchedrin showed his talents in the Fables, The History of a Town, and his masterpiece, The Golovlyov Family.
James Wood is a novelist, staff critic at The New Yorker magazine, and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University.