Stalin's Children

The facts of Russia and the Cold War are made personal and relevant in this deeply personal account - appealing to a broad market of anyone interested in life behind the Iron Curtain. Stalin's Children has been longlisted for the 2009 Orwell Prize for political writing. For fans of Timothy Garton-Ash's The File: A Personal History, and the 2007 film The Lives of Others Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2008

An unprecedented insight into the grim brutality of the Russian revolution and the terror of the Cold WarOn a midsummer day in 1937, Boris Bibikov kissed his two daughters goodbye and disappeared. One of those girls, Lyudmila, was to fall in love with a tall young foreigner in Moscow at the height of the Cold War and embark on a dangerous and passionate affair. Decades later, a reporter in nineties Moscow, her son Owen Matthews pieces together his grandfather's passage through the harrowing world of Stalin's purges, and tells the story of his parents' Cold War love affair through their heartbreaking letters and memories. Stalin's Children is a raw, vivid memoir about a young man's struggle to understand his parents' lives and the history of the strange country in which they lived.