Olga Grushina’s writing career is unique: her first novel, “The Life of Sukhanov in Dreams,” despite the exotic subject matter for the American reader, turned out to be unusually successful. It received accolades from leading American and British publications, was included in the New York Times list of the most notable books of 2006, and was nominated for the British literary award Orange Prize. In 2007, the authoritative British magazine Granta included Olga Grushina in its list of the best young novelists in the United States, updated for the first time in ten years. The plot of “The Queue” is based on a real historical episode - the return of eighty-year-old Igor Stravinsky to Russia in 1962, after a fifty-year absence. People, who have been standing in line at a nondescript kiosk for almost a year, dreaming of buying a ticket to a concert of the great composer. For some, this ticket is a pass to a future that has nothing to do with the squalor of Soviet life; for others, it is an opportunity to remember the past, when they were happy and free...