The True Memoirs of Little K A Novel [Paperback]

A California Book Award Finalist

One of Oprah's Book Club's Ten Fantastic Books for Fall 2010

Historical Novel ReviewEditors' Choice

Exiled in Paris, the frail, elderly Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charmingprima ballerina assolutaof the tsar's Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Kschessinska's riveting storytelling soon thrusts us into a world lost to time: that great intersection of the Russian court and the Russian theater. Through Kschessinska's memories of her own triumphs and defeats, we witness the stories that changed history, from the seething beginnings of revolution to the end of a grand, decadent way of life that belonged to the nineteenth century. Based on fact, Adrienne Sharp'sThe True Memoirs of Little Kis an engrossing tale of love, loss, and history (The Wichita Eagle).

Adrienne Sharpentered the world of ballet at age seven and trained at the prestigious Harkness Ballet in New York. She received her M.A. with honors from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University and was awarded a Henry Hoyns Fellowship at the University of Virginia. She has been a fiction fellow at MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference. She is the author ofWhite Swan,Black SwanandThe Sleeping Beauty.

1. The novel's title claims these are Mathilde's true memoirs. Is any memoir entirely true? What aspects of his or her life might a memoirist attempt to concealor rewrite? What is illuminating about reading a fictionalized account of someone's life as opposed to an autobiography or a biography?

2. In what ways did Mathilde's affair with Nicholas give her both more power and less? Consider her position both in the theater and in society. How did this affair empower her or limit her in these realms? How did other prominent women, such as thl£0