From the award-winning author of The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov comes the brilliantly conceived and precisely rendered novel Immaculate Blue, which explores the lives of four people — Anatole, Leigh, Chris, and Lydia — and their intermingled and unwinding desires. Set in upstate New York, the novel follows these characters as they achieve their aims in lives redolent with loss and hope, humor and sadness, union and alienation. Russell picks up the thread of his critically acclaimed novel The Salt Point 20 years later and tracks the lives of these friends, some of whom not only lost touch with each other but have also lost their way. Moving, at times shocking, and always memorable, Immaculate Blue points to where the personal and the political come together and shape our lives in unexpected ways. With this newest novel, Paul Russell reminds us of why he is one of the most important voices on the literary scene.

In his novel based on the extraordinary life of the brother of Vladimir Nabokov Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey his family and friends lived; from wealth and position in pre-revolutionary Russia to the halls of Cambridge University and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But it is the honesty and vulnerability of Sergey our young gay narrator that hook the reader: his stuttering childhood in the shadow of his brilliant brother his opium-fueled evenings with Cocteau his troubled love life on the margins of the Ballets Russes and its legendary cast and his isolation in war-torn Berlin.A meticulously researched novel featuring an extraordinary cast of characters (including Picasso Diaghilev Stravinsky Magnus Hirschfield and of course the master himself Vladimir Nabokov) this is ultimately the story of a beautiful and vulnerable boy growing into an enlightened and courageous man.

Country boy Tony is seduced by a smooth-talking pornographer, who brings the young man to New York to star in and recruit younger boys into a string of increasingly violent sex films. An escape, a marriage and a murder follow the story's cinematic arc of innocence, betrayal, redemption and revenge.