Old House Under the Cypress Tree

A strangely meandering story for a book of less than 140 pages, to me it is a relatively ‘easy to put down' book, it didn't grip me. Interested and nicely written, it is without chapters, and has a very even pace.
This is the autobiographical story of the childhood and Abkhazian family of the author, set commencing just prior to World War II, and finishing in the late 1950s. There are many characters to like, famous ex-footballer Uncle Riza,the drunk lawyer Uncle Samad, mad uncle Kolya as well as his own mother and father and his cinema-loving aunt with a melodramatic temperament. There are also the troublesome tenants taking up rooms around the courtyard when the family are in hard times - the upwardly mobile Rich Tailor and the epileptic Russian intellectual.
The story unravels with a backdrop of current events - propaganda films, the encouragement to seek out traitors, spies and saboteurs who lurk in every family, the bewildering political changes which turn Germans from fascists into friends and back again, followed by the never explained arrests by the secret police and the deportations. The Old House Under the Cypress Tree is the description of family life in hard times told through the lifetime of a child, some bad some good.