The Green Parrot

Through an anonymous daughter of five Bibesco’s work details the plight of an upper-class Russian family exiled to France on the eve of World War I. Stricken by grief and so far removed from czarist Russia the narrator finds solace watching a green parrot through a shop window. A coming of age and a reckoning with predestination, Bibesco’s short novel is an essential modern work.

Proust and Marthe Bibesco were natives of the same land and their touching fingertips at the ball was more deeply significant that the embraces of those who danced together till dawn