a plump, whitehaired woman in her late sixties with alert brown eyes and several moles on her round face; she also had a bad back and arthritic fingers. Clive Franklin, a Russian language expert in the Foreign Office, is summoned unexpectedly to Moscow to act as translator for the British Prime Minister. W ritten by an insider: Harriet Crawley lived in Moscow for many years, working in the energy sector at a time of exploding wealth concentration and increasingly violent political repression. A paragraph on the rear of the book from a paper written by none other than Rishi Sunak should have warned me to steer clear but i paid little attention at the time as i was quite excited to find a new novel that centres on a subject i have been following for many years.

Can the resourceful Marina navigate treacherous Kremlin power politics and pass on details of the plot? Connie is remarkably emotional in her work and also remarkably credulous, but that does not spoil the pace and tension of this novel, Connie’s touching back story or the relationships she develops with other individuals in the institution. The traditional locked-room-mystery format has been updated in this story of a reality television show being filmed in the Arctic on the tightest possible budget. His services are needed urgently for a trip to Moscow to act as translator for the new firebrand PM, Martha Maitland, as she undertakes tricky talks with the Russian president Nikolai Serov. The Translator has all the hallmarks of the first part in a new series, and there is a lovely hook into a possible sequel that I really want to read.But it was the new Olympic speed skating center on the edge of town which found its way into my story. Taylor’s engaging heroine, architect Cat Hakesby, is working for a client building new almshouses in Holborn. However, it was the supporting acts that I found so fascinating, from the Russian president who sees himself as a surrogate father, to the awful FSB chief General Varlamov (who reminded me of Beria) who hates Marina, and the President’s Aide Lev, her only friend in the Kremlin. On reading this book, one could be forgiven for thinking you have heard all of it before, because, unless you avoid all uk news, you most probably have heard it all before.

Clive's appearance stirs feelings she thought were long buried, and through him she sees a possibility that she might escape the position she is in.

In 1945, he married the sometime war correspondent Virginia Cowles (24 August 1910 – 6 September 1983), [15] [16] daughter of the controversial [17] society doctor Edward Spencer Cowles MD, [18] with whom he had 3 children. But they too have eyes and ears, and proximity to power means they can pick up all sorts of intelligence. What are the odds that two lovers, running the Moscow marathon with the FSB on their backs, can save Western Europe from economic meltdown?

He thinks and speaks the language like a native, but there is no doubt that the demands of his career as a translator for the Foreign Office are taking their toll. Our hero would be the translator (he hates the word ‘interpreter’) assigned to the British Prime Minister, while our heroine would act as interpreter for the Russian President. Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad• A taut, highly topical thriller, set in Moscow and centred on a devastating Russian plot to sabotage the undersea communication cables linking the US to the UK.Clive, a man keen to remain in the background, is catapulted into a tight web of intrigue and espionage.

Belle is an appealing figure, telling the reader her story as she swims every morning, braving the cold of Southwold’s winter sea. S300] Michael Rhodes, "re: Ernest Fawbert Collection," e-mail message to Darryl Roger Lundy, 8 February. She would translate impossibly complicated books such as Gas Well De-Liquification from English into Russian.The idea of Serov wanting to be the ‘Russian Bear’, the cult of personality around him and the blatant desire for power and standing in the world.