The invention of exile, by Vanessa Manko

A quiet but affecting novel based on the author’s family history.  Austin, born Ustin Alexandrovich Voronkov, arrives in the United States in 1913.   When he moves to a boardinghouse, he meets Julia, one of two daughters of the owner, and they fall in love. Although Austin is apolitical, if anything anti-political, hunger for Russian companionship leads him to associate with a group that has anarchist leanings.  Caught up in a raid against of the group, he and his new wife, who weds him on Ellis Island, are deported to Russia, which is in the throes of revolution.  Not much of the story is about their years there or their years after they escape to the continent.  Ultimately they go to Mexico, where the young family, now including three children, hope to be able to petition to return to the United States.  Julia is repatriated not long afterwards, along with the children, but for the next decades, Austin is stuck in in Mexico where he works at low-level jobs.  An engineer by training, he spends his free time inventing devices and sending his plans off to the U. S. Patent Office, convinced that this will help his case to return to the US and his family.  In interesting depiction of what it is like to be stranded in exile by the larger forces at work in the world, but only Austin is a fully realized character.  291 pp.