Banished from home and country by the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution, a princely Russian family of four flees ever westward... into the arms of Golden Age Hollywood. Along their fraught and winding trajectory toward an uncertain future, young Igor Yurievitch Smertyov retreats into a fantasy life of model-making, movie monsters, and the new "scientific fiction"-and starts a lifetime of catch-up with his past, with his identity, and with his poised, effortlessly creative older brother Sascha. In this literary historical novel-a family saga of alternating timelines-we follow Igor along this rocky road, and see him center stage in his crisis year of 1959 when, as film director "Iggy Smart," he has one last chance to show his Oscar-winning sibling what he's made of. Beset by chronic OCD and a film studio threatening to pull the plug on him, Iggy struggles to complete his magnum opus. Never quite sure if he's at the apex of his career or poised over an abyss, Iggy bulls forward against multiple headwinds to finish shooting The Beast-a big-monster movie meant to rival Japanese "kaiju" films and the classics of his youth, King Kong and The Lost World.