The Globe and Mail (January 2012): Jane Smiley
It isn’t incidental that award-winning Toronto novelist Eva Stachniak asks us to ponder the Winter Palace, in St. Petersburg, Russia, before she asks us to ponder Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, and her predecessor, Elizabeth.
The Winter Palace is a setting, a character and a symbol, and Stachniak lays out in riveting detail how life is lived there by all sorts of characters who are in thrall to the empresses, from the lowest seamstress to the most powerful courtesan.
Stachniak’s vision casts light over recent Russian history too, which is exactly what a piece of historical fiction should do. The Winter Palace is filled with a sense of disorienting vastness punctuated by particular rules and charms that people use to give themselves a feeling of control. The look on Vladimir Putin’s face when he realized he hadn’t prevailed in last year’s elections? Varvara would have recognized it perfectly.
The Washington Post (February 2012): Donna Rifkind
The Winter Palace is included in The Washington Post list of 50 notable books of 2012.
We don’t see Catherine take the crown until the end of the novel (a sequel is already in the works). Yet by the time she becomes empress, we’ve taken the measure of the steely foresight that will qualify her to serve as Russia’s longest-reigning female monarch, equipped to guide her hidebound empire into the age of enlightenment. At the same time baroque and intimate, worldly and domestic, wildly strange and soulfully familiar, “The Winter Palace” offers a flickering glimpse of history through the gauze of a deft entertainment.
The Book Reporter (January 2012), Melanie Smith
Espionage. Cloak-and-dagger mystery. Political intrigue. Unguessable plotlines. Visions of extreme opulence and depravity. Sound history. Strong, descriptive prose that shrewdly exposes the subtle forces at work in a polluted Russian Court. These are but a few of the elements Eva Stachniak brings to the pages of her new book, THE WINTER PALACE.
“I cannot recommend THE WINTER PALACE highly enough. Any reader who enjoys history or historical fiction will be sure to love this book.”
The Washington Independent Review of Books (2012), Maria Kontak
A strong grip, we are told, is an indicator of longevity, and Eva Stachniak’s The Winter Palace: A Novel of Catherine the Great opens with a grip. Flirtatious and relaxed at initial touch, imperceptibly it places the reader in thrall for 464 pages. For who among us can honestly deny a fascination with spies and the glamorous, deadly world that is spying? Even more so, palace intrigue Imperial Russia-style. Catherine the Great-style. And, if that’s not enough, there is Stachniak’s crisp tone and cadence, slipping in and out of the narrative like a panegyrical tone poem: “I was a tongue, a gazette. The bearer of the ‘truth of the whispers.’ ”
The Quill and Quire (January 2012), Christina Decarie
Eva Stachniak’s first novel, Necessary Lies, won the 2000 Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. That book told a contemporary story; her follow-up, Garden of Venus, and her latest,The Winter Palace, together should establish her as a pre-eminent writer of historical fiction. …
What Stachniak has given us is not history, but a dramatic recreation of what the witnesses to history actually manage to see and do.
Booklist (November 2011). Sarah Johnson
Polish-Canadian author Stachniak’s brilliant, bold historical novel of eighteenth-century Russia is a masterful account of one woman’s progress toward absolute monarchical rule.
Stachniak captures dramatic moments with flair, and the Russian imperial court—with its fox-fur blankets, gilded furniture, and carafes of cherry vodka—appears in glorious splendor. This superb biographical epic proves the Tudors don’t have a monopoly on marital scandal, royal intrigue, or feminine triumph.
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