Chimes of a lost cathedral / Janet Fitch.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A young Russian woman comes into her own in the midst of revolution and civil war in this "brilliant" novel set in "a world of furious beauty" ( Los Angeles Review of Books ).
After the loves and betrayals of The Revolution of Marina M. , young poet Marina Makarova finds herself alone amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War -- pregnant and adrift, forced to rely on her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child and eventually make her way back to her native city, Petrograd.
After two years of revolution, the city that was once St. Petersburg is almost unrecognizable, the haunted, half-emptied, starving Capital of Once Had Been, its streets teeming with homeless children. Moved by their plight, though hardly better off herself, she takes on the challenge of caring for these orphans, until they become the tool of tragedy from an unexpected direction.
Shaped by her country's ordeals and her own trials -- betrayal and privation and inconceivable loss -- Marina evolves as a poet and a woman of sensibility and substance hardly imaginable at the beginning of her transformative odyssey.
Chimes of a Lost Cathedral is the culmination of one woman's s journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century -- the epic story of an artist who discovers her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Fitch's satisfying sequel to The Revolution of Marina M. continues the saga of Marina Makarova, a 19-year-old poet and revolutionary who has rejected her bourgeois family in favor of the Bolshevik Revolution. Picking up in 1919, the novel begins with pregnant Marina deciding to leave behind her unfaithful lover, Kolya, to join a spiritualist cult. A few months into joining, Marina is fully immersed in Red October propaganda and reconnected with her estranged husband, Genya. When Genya abandons her during childbirth in rural Udmurtia, Marina decides to return to her childhood home of St. Petersburg. There, she faces the consequences of past choices, as well as the grim realities of the Russian Civil War and the revolution she helped bring about. After enduring near starvation, a deadly winter, confrontations with the secret police, and devastating personal tragedies, Marina becomes a tenant of the House of the Arts, a collectivized residence for Petersburg's remaining intellectuals. Influenced by Russian literary giants Alexander Blok, Maxim Gorky, and Nicolay Gumilov, Marina grows increasingly ambivalent toward the Bolsheviks-and her support of counter-revolutionaries makes her a political target. Fitch's impressive attention to historical detail and Marina's bold voice carry the often winding story. Though the narrative is overlong, Fitch's many fans will enjoy this immersive tale. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins Group (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Fitch's transporting sequel to The Revolution of Marina M. (2017) is even better than the first book. Ceaselessly entertaining through its lengthy page count, it presents a disillusioned, more mature Marina Makarova as she is broken and remade alongside Russia during its civil war. As the novel opens, 19-year-old Marina, pregnant with her lover's child, has just escaped from a cult on her family's former estate. Her journeys take her deep into the Russian countryside and back to her devastated home city. In this full-blooded feminine epic, Marina narrates her dramatic life with striking visual detail, whether she's riding aboard the agit-train Red October, preparing for the White Army's advance on Petrograd, or teaching poetry to downtrodden shoe-factory women desperate for a glimpse of beauty. Enduring near-starvation and terrible poverty and loss, Marina forms strong connections with peasants and the artistic intelligentsia alike, but can't manage to leave her past behind. The revolution's not an event, Marina. It's a creature, Maxim Gorky tells her, and Fitch shows her protagonist's inner turmoil as she and Russian workers awaken to the revolution's political reality, which is far from what they'd hoped. Awash with emotion and poetic imagery that aptly reflect Marina's changing circumstances, Fitch's tale channels the woman's vibrant spirit throughout. Historical-fiction fans should devour this.--Sarah Johnson Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The second installment of a young poet's trials in war-torn Russia, 1919-1921.In another massive tome, Fitch (The Revolution of Marina M., 2017, etc.) picks up where she left offher heroine, Marina, once a bourgeois princess in a refined intellectual family in Petrograd, is now 19, pregnant, and desperately seeking work, shelter, and proletarian papers in the outlying burg of Tikhvin. Not long after she gets herself situated, her lusty nature gets her in trouble againand then her long-lost poet husband (not the father of the child, unfortunately) rolls into town on an agit-prop train. Rescued from rural tedium, she's off with the actors, sailors, and soldiers riding the rails. Up on the roof of one of the cars, she glories in a "soar of spirits I never expected to feel again.Ah, the rush, the sweep of the horizon, this enormous country headed into its future! I felt like I was riding time itself, the sun on my face, the freshness of the fields, the great green expanse of Russia in the blue bowl of her heavens." This will be one of her only happy moments in more than 700 pages of tumultuous plot, but no matter what grisly doom and miserable fate befall her, Marina continues to think big, in swathes of grand prose and plenty of quoted poetry. After she gives birth, she makes her way back to Petrograd, a city starving, collapsing, and writhing in agony. But on the plus side, she meets all the great writers of the period and is embraced as a promising new talent. The writer and activist Maxim Gorky plays a major role in the story; Blok, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Gumilev, and many others are also on the scene. This part of the book seems a bit special interest for the general reader of historical fiction but will be a treat for fans of Russian literature. Since the first volume began with a prologue set in 1932 and this one only gets us to 1921, one wonders if Marina's story will end here.An unusual and passionate re-creation of the terrible tragedy of the Bolshevik Revolution and the timeless literary culture it produced. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.