Louise Maude

Seventeen-year-old Masha has lost her mother and her hope-until Sergei Mikhailych, a family friend twice her age, walks back into her life. His quiet presence awakens something in her: first friendship, then love, then the dizzying belief that marriage will be an eternity of stolen glances and trembling hearts. It is not. Tolstoy's luminous novella traces the arc of love from its first flush through the slow, quiet disappointment of reality.
The country estate grows still. The husband retreats behind newspapers and duty. The city calls with its glitter and its dangerous glances. And Masha must ask herself: what remains when the romance has faded? Written before Tolstoy's own marriage, Family Happiness is a work of almost unsettling prescience-a meditation on the distance between what we imagine love to be and what it becomes. Told entirely through Masha's voice, it captures the ache of growing up, the loneliness of two people who no longer understand each other, and the hard-won peace that may-or may not-be enough. The most honest love story ever written.
And the most heartbreaking.