Pushkin and the Queen of Spades Book

Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award

Windsor Armstrong is a polished, Harvard educated, African-American professor of Russian literature. Her son, Pushkin X, is an exceedingly famous pro-football player, an achievement that impresses his mother not at all. Even more distressing, however, is that her beloved son has just become engaged to a gorgeous white Russian émigré who also happens to be a lap dancer.

For Windsor, this is no laughing matter. Determined to get to the source of it, she embarks on a journey into her own rich past. As she moves ever closer to the secret that has cast a shadow over her life, she discovers that the half-lies she has fed her son don't add up to the beauty of the truth

The Washington Post - Darryl Lorenzo Wellington

Alice Randall gives us a character (and Windsor Armstrong is a great character), a situation, a pulse, a sense of the contradictions that life involves. The book isn't overwhelmed by the urgency to say something pithy, corrective and unequivocal. Better a fictional character's fumbling contradictions than unrealistic, arrogant or badly thought out answers. The story of Windsor Armstrong and Pushkin X humanizes the issues, and that in turn humanizes the reader.