The Black Russian (PB 306 pages)

Frederick Bruce Thomas’s life reads like an epic that history somehow overlooked. Born in Mississippi to formerly enslaved parents, he escaped the racial violence of the post‑Reconstruction South and reinvented himself across continents. His journey carried him from the American South to London, Paris, and ultimately Moscow, where he mastered languages, navigated high society, and built a glittering career as a celebrated nightclub owner known as “The Black Russian.” When revolution destroyed everything he had built, he fled once more—this time to Constantinople—where he fought to rebuild his life in a city on the brink of collapse. Alexandrov reveals a man of extraordinary resilience, ambition, and adaptability, whose story challenges assumptions about race, identity, and possibility in the early twentieth century.