When Vavara, a young Polish orphan, arrives at the glittering, dangerous court of the Empress Elizabeth in St Petersburg, she is schooled in skills ranging from lock-picking to love-making, learning above all else to stay silent – and listen....

This tense, gripping novel set in 19C St Petersburg amid desperate revolutionaries bent on the overthrow of the Tsar ‘confirms Andrew William’s place in the front ranks of English thriller writers’ (Daily Mail). Shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters...

To The Hermitage is Sir Malcolm Bradbury’s first novel in nearly a decade, and its length and ambition provide some clue as to why it has been so long in the making. The novel begins with the arrival of...

The story opens in 2001, when sisters Nina, both in their 40s, are facing major life changes. Fact and fiction are interwoven into the story as they look back over their Father’s life in Russia

A great setting of 19th Century St Petersburg for this crime novel

Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman’s deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town...

In the fall of 1914, safe behind palace walls, Katya Ivanova sees St. Petersburg as a magical place. The daughter of a lady-in-waiting to the Empress, Katya spends all her time with the Grand Duchesses; the royal family feels...

For fans of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Umberto Eco Vodolazkin’s new novel Brisbane is “a sophisticated and frequently moving study in dissonance, dedicated to pointing out contrasts between art and life, beauty and decay, intention and outcome. And, yes, between Ukraine and...

Dostoyevsky’s great novel of damnation and redemption evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur. It tells the story of Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, who wanders through the slums of...

Devil’s Acre is a novel about love, Russia and forbidden architecture. Moscow, 1982. The oppressive Soviet regime is solidly in place: Leonid Brezhnev is praised to the skies for the brilliance of his unreadable memoirs: and the KGB is...