Mother

Gorky's 1907 masterpiece captures a mother watching her son become someone she doesn't recognize, then learning to recognize herself in the process. Set in a grim industrial suburb where factory smokestacks choke the sky and men return home smelling of metal and despair, the novel follows Pelagueya Vlasova, an illiterate factory worker trapped in a marriage to a brutal husband. When her son Pavel begins attending secret meetings, bringing home pamphlets and speaking of justice, she doesn't understand what he's become. Only when she finds herself standing in a crowd, suddenly capable of something more than silence, does she begin to transform. This is the story of two awakenings: a son's political awakening and a mother's awakening to her own power. Written in the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Mother became the template for socialist realism, but its power transcends ideology. This is a novel about what happens when ordinary people decide they are no longer willing to accept the world as it is.