To the Hermitage Guy Gunaratne making new friends and big

making new friends and big decisions

When the entire Soviet Union wheat crop is destroyed by a devastating string of failures

is overwhelmed by the thrill of opportunity and startled by his own hunger for friendship

Lo Martin was once a student there

But when he returns home to New York for his father's funeral to discover he has been left nearly $50 million in a numbered Swiss bank account

To the Hermitage Guy Gunaratne making new friends and bigTo the Hermitage tells two stories. The first is of the narrator, a novelist, on a trip to Stockholm and Russia for an academic seminar called the Diderot Project. The second takes place two hundred years earlier and recreates the journey the French philosopher Denis Diderot made to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great, a woman whose influence could change the path of history . . . Malcolm Bradburys last novel is rich with his satirical