First book is planned on the Tsarnaev brothers

The Lowell Sun & Robin Young / AP

This combination of undated photos shows Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, left, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19.

By Julie Bosman, New York Times News Service

Wednesday, May 1, 2013 | 10:07 p.m.

The first major book on the Tsarnaev brothers, the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, has been acquired by Riverhead Books, the publisher said Wednesday.

It will be written by the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, the author of "The Man Without a Face," a biography of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Gessen would seem well qualified to write the book: She is fluent in Russian and English, has reported from Chechnya — where the Tsarnaev family has roots — and emigrated to the Boston area when she was a teenager.

According to the publisher, an imprint of Penguin Group, 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."

A spokeswoman for Riverhead Books, Jynne Martin, said Gessen was leaving her job at Radio Liberty to concentrate exclusively on the book on the two Tsarnaev brothers — Tamerlan, 26, who died after a shootout with the police, and Dzhokhar, 19, who is being held in a prison hospital.

No publication date has been set.