300 pages, Trade Paperback, Fiction
Release Date: September, 2012
ISBN 13: 978-1-47764-890-2
Available in print and eBook
Published by The Russian Estate
When Nicolas returns to Sylvan Hills, the home of his childhood, the estate is filled with scarring memories and a frightful cast of characters. But now circumstances have changed for Nicolas, and with the help of his friend Sergey, he takes control of the estate and settles old scores.
Berengaut’s novel is about the pain and mystery of childhood—and about making things right—all set against the backdrop of an exotic Russian landscape.
Here is a revenge tale of extraordinary strategy and thoughtfulness. In The Estate of Wormwood & Honey, the reader enters a real world generations and nations removed—my great-grandmother’s “Old Russia.” Though the journey of the justice-seeking hero to take and keep the catbird’s seat on his own bitter past leads through some excruciatingly familiar places in the human heart, in the end, this broad-spreading self-understanding is the vehicle to hope.
—Zofia Burr, Dean, George Mason University
It’s a funny experience, reading The Estate of Wormwood & Honey. You watch as Berengaut traces out the intricate power plays and sly maneuverings among petty bureaucrats, failed nobles, and a secretly returning charismatic coung in a provincial, 19th century Russian town and you wonder: how’d he do that? What power of the brain lets a 21st century man in America render something so foreign, so odd to his own way of life, so well? Of course, we know that power—imagination—but still it’s a strange and thrilling thing. Enter this, a world delicately drawn and charming.
—Joseph Young, author of Easter Rabbit and Name