Tsarnaev brothers will be focus of new biography

The biography's author Masha Gessen, a journalist born in Russia who has also lived in the US, has also written about Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The Tsarnaev brothers, the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing case, will be the focus of a new book by a biographer who has previously tackled Vladimir Putin, according to publisher Riverhead Books.

Masha Gessen, whose previous work is titled “The Man Without A Face,” is Russian-American and has worked as a journalist in Chechnya. She will be departing her current job at Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, where she worked as director of the Russian-language sector.

There is currently no scheduled release date or planned title.

The book will “reconstruct the struggle that ensued for each of the brothers between assimilation and alienation, and their metamorphosis into a new breed of home-grown terrorist, with their feet on American soil but their loyalties elsewhere, a split in identity that opened them to a deadly sense of mission,” according to the press release from Riverhead Books, which is an imprint of Penguin.

Riverhead’s Jynne Martin told the Atlantic Wire that Gessen told them she felt particularly qualified to write the book on the brothers because she emigrated from Russia to Boston when she was young. She later returned to Russia.

“She was talking to us about how to her there’s actually this very personal and real sense about what it means to be displaced from your culture,” Martin said.

There’s no word on whether the Tsarnaev family will speak with Gessen.