Our American — Brian B. Kelly

Our American, A Romance of Moscow is set against the end of the Cold War and the final days of the Soviet Union. It is the second volume of a Russian trilogy following The Irish Smuggler, published in 2013. Our American is an introduction to Russia and Russians at a time of daring new beginnings. The reader will experience the bizarre economy, the street battles, the hopes and heroism of emerging Russian democracy, the early days of independent Russian television, its spacebridges and beauty contests, as the oligarchs and carpetbaggers arrive, as buried history and secret spies are uncovered. Moscow in the early 1990s was, for a few short years, a time of new American focus on Russia and a time of misguided help and exploitation. Our American is the romancing of an adversary, of a May-December love and friendship across space, time, culture and language. William Robert Egan, ‘Bill', in his early forties, a second generation Yank, is Our American. With talent and daring he has skated himself into a high tech teleproduction business, but he is now confronted by bankruptcy on one hand and a hostile takeover on the other. He faces his life's less and less carefree choices as he dreams of leap-frogging the dog-eat-dog competition in New York to discover a new business frontier in what is still called the evil empire. He is patriotic, not xenophobic or jingoistic, but it is not easy to say what lures him to Moscow. There is some hope of financial success, but his new partner and recently discovered first cousin, Padraic Egan, a mysterious, raw ex-IRA chieftain, is a strong influence to this end, as is a new friend, Aleksey Bazhov, a leading light among Soviet state televison's democratic activists. Above all, the vividness of Bill's own imagination in seeking the unknown of a forbidden land draws him there. And there is a note of lust in that, a lust for new love, for adventure. Early on, Bill meets young Natalya Gorachova, a beautiful model and Russian patriot who he hopes will reveal her country's secrets.