Moscow Trilogy

Winter, 1917: In St. Petersburg snow is falling, and Russia is on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police.Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just eighteen years old. In the evenings, when her banker father is doing deals and her mother is partying with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka becomes Comrade Snowfox and slips into the frozen night to play her part in a game of conspiracy and seduction that will usher in a brave new Communist world.Twenty years on, and Sashenka is married to a high-up apparatchik in Stalin's government. She seems to have everything-yet all around her, her friends are being arrested and people are disappearing. Then Stalin himself comes for dinner, and Sashenka falls passionately in love, thereby setting in motion a terrifying sequence of events that will result in her having to make the most agonizing choice of all: whether to sacrifice her own life or that of those she loves most dearly.

The stunning new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem, set during an epic cavalry ride across the hot grasslands outside Stalingrad during the darkest times of World War II"The black earth was already baking and the sun was just rising when they mounted their horses and rode across the grasslands towards the horizon on fire..."Imprisoned in the Gulags for a crime he did not commit, Benya Golden joins a penal battalion made up of Cossacks and convicts to fight the Nazis. He enrolls in the Russian cavalry, and on a hot summer day in July 1942, he and his band of brothers are sent on a suicide mission behind enemy lines-but is there a traitor among them? The only thing Benya can truly trust is his horse, Silver Socks, and that he will find no mercy in the onslaught of Hitler's troops as they push east.Spanning ten epic days, between Benya's war on the grasslands of southern Russia and Stalin's intrigues in the Kremlin, between Benya's intense affair with an Italian nurse and a romance between Stalin's daughter and a war correspondent, this is a sweeping story of passion, bravery, and survival-where betrayal is a constant companion, death just a heartbeat away, and love, however fleeting, offers a glimmer of redemption.

The acclaimed novelist and prizewinning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore explores the consequences of forbidden love in this heartbreaking epic, inspired by a true story that unfolds in Stalin's Russia during the bleak days after World War II. A jubilant Moscow is celebrating the Soviet Union's victory over Hitler when gunshots ring out though the city's crowded streets. In the shadow of the Kremlin, a teenage boy and girl are found dead. But this is no ordinary tragedy, because these are no ordinary teenagers. As the children of high-ranking Soviet officials, they inhabit a rarefied world that revolves around the exclusive Josef Stalin Commune School 801. The school, which Stalin's own children attended, is an enclave of privilege-but, as the deaths reveal, one that hides a wealth of secrets. Were these deaths an accident, a suicide pact . . . or murder? Certain that a deeper conspiracy is afoot, Stalin launches a ruthless investigation. In what comes to be known as the Children's Case, youths from all over Moscow are arrested by state security services and brought to the infamous interrogation rooms of the Lubyanka, where they are forced to testify against their friends and their families. Among the casualties of these betrayals are two pairs of illicit lovers, who find themselves trapped at the center of Stalin's witch hunt. As the Children's Case follows its increasingly terrifying course, these couples discover that the decision to follow one's heart comes at a terrible price. A haunting evocation of a time and place in which the state colluded to corrupt and destroy every dream, One Night in Winter is infused with the desperate intrigue of a political thriller. The eminent historian Simon Sebag Montefiore weaves fact and fiction into a richly compelling saga of sacrifice and survival, populated by real figures from the past. But within the darkness shines a deeply human love story, one that transcends its moment as it masterfully explores our capacity for loyalty and forgiveness.