Untitled Fiction 2

December 1934. Moscow is in ferment after the assassination of one of Stalin's closest aides, leading to a wave of new arrests and summary executions.

Investigator Anton Belkin already thinks he is close to breaking point, when his close friend, the chef Misha Kazakov, is arrested on a trumped-up charge of attempted assassination by poisoning of a senior Moscow official. For Anton the question isn't whether Misha is guilty, but why the secret police want him out of the way.

And with Anton's father, a dissenting artist, attracting attention in all the wrong ways, whether Anton can save Misha without becoming ensnared in the ever-more tangled web of conspiracy around him.

Reviews

PRAISE FOR MOSCOW UNDERGROUND

A Times and Financial Times Book of the Year

'A gripping thriller and Belkin is a character many readers will want to encounter again' The Sunday Times

'Remarkable… Merridale, an acclaimed historian of Russia, showcases her knowledge of the country and its dark past to bring a richly-drawn cast of characters to life in a marvellously evoked 1930s Moscow. If only all first novels were as enthralling as this' Financial Times

'Merridale’s talents as a Russia expert and writer combine to beam light on the depths of Moscow’s underworld' The Sun, four-star review

'Catherine Merridale is a very well-known historian of Soviet Russia, so in Moscow Underground an engrossing thriller set in Stalin’s Moscow, she knows whereof she so beguilingly write… It’s intensely exciting, but also moving; and, as you’d expect from the author of Merridale’s history books, it tells us a lot about Stalin’s Russia – including why men and women fought for it, and stayed in it'

The Tablet

‘Gripping, moving and fascinating. A heartbreaking and passionate novel of the cruelty and fragility of love, death and life in Stalinist Russia by a great storyteller who also happens to be an outstanding historian. I loved it’ Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of the Moscow Trilogy

‘Both a brilliant thriller and a historical record of the ambition, terror and deviousness of that black era in Russian history’ Gareth Rubin, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Turnglass

‘Moscow´s subway system was built to transform an old imperial capital into a modern Soviet metropolis but digging deep in the very heart of an empire can unleash the fates. Moscow Underground excavates the very foundation of the Russian state, a daring journey to the origins of Stalinism, all the more timely because in contemporary Russia the figure of Stalin is making an ominous comeback’ Sergei Lebedev, author of The Lady of The Mine