Astonish Me: A novel

This is the irresitble story of Joan, a young American dancer who helps a Soviet ballet star, the great Arslan Fusakov defect in 1975. A flash of fame and a passionate love affair follw, but Joan knows that, onstage and off, she is destined to remain in the background.For years Joan has been trying to forget her past, to find peace and satisfaction in her role as wife and mother. Few in her drowsy California suburb know her thrilling history: as a young American ballerina in Paris, she fell into a doomed, passionate romance with Soviet dance superstar Arslan Rusakov. After playing a leading role in his celebrated defection, Joan bowed out of the spotlight for good, heartbroken by Arslan and humbled by her own modest career. But when her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy, Joan is pulled back into a world she thought she'd left behind-a world of dangerous secrets, of Arslan, and of longing for what will always be just out of reach. Maggie Shipstead is a graduate of the Iowa's Writers' Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford Univ. Her first novel, Seating Arrangements, was a national best seller, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction