TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: Narrative that is direct, candid, unpretentious. A member of a highly privileged caste in Soviet society… reduced to a ‘mozho’ girl mixing with foreigners, with instructions to report on them… the real story is in the simple, graphic and almost entirely persuasive account of her observations – some amusing and others horribly or pitifully gruesome.
In the unforgiving WWII climate of 1940, 21-year old Nora is faced with a perilous ultimatum: Enlist with Stalin’s secret police as a honey trap, or face the death of her family. Despairingly she agrees.
Nora finds herself struggling to seduce her target, John Murray, a British Embassy cypher in Moscow.
As two disparate lives intertwine, their desperate escape leads the couple through frozen Arctic wastelands, clutching forged papers and hopes not just for survival but for a future together.
Over de auteur
John Murray born of Greek/Irish parents and brought up in Edwardian England soon found himself working in Latvia. Having achieved a commercial education at Pitman’s College he was put in charge of managing a cigarette factory. Later, he became its owner while also running an import export business in the Baltic States.
As war loomed large in Europe his fortunes changed. He was called upon to work for the British Government eventually finding himself as a cypher in the British Embassy, Moscow. During this time, John a highly insightful self-made individual succumbed to the entreaties of a desperate human being and found himself engulfed in the intricacies of Soviet WWII espionage and counter-intelligence.