The Road to Rome relates a Soviet Casanova's secret love affairs with women from the West: these encounters are his way of breaking out of stifling Soviet reality and into an exotic and forbidden world. Eventually able to travel abroad, he ends up spending a year in America and returns to Moscow - the Third Rome - a changed man. The appeal of this book is not only in its infectious eroticism, its wit and humor, but mainly in its masterful portrayal of Soviet Russia in the 1970s. Nominated for the Russian Booker Prize, The Road to Rome was named one of the ten best books of 1994.

Born in 1951, Nikolai Klimontovich trained as a physicist before becoming a prize-winning novelist and playwright.