Reading by candlelight, sleeping in her clothes and waiting impatiently for the few hours of electricity she could expect each week, Wendell Steavenson lived like everyone else in post-Soviet Georgia. She met children who did not know what a heater was, and people who intoxicated and beguiled her with both their wine and their stories.
And she fell in love - with a man who left her, the scoured the country for a thousand red roses to win her back . . .