“I was captured by the velvet lyricism of his prose and his le Carré-ish plot … A geologist by training, Lebedev’s fiction excavates what lies beneath: the inner lives of earlier generations, buried under layers of official myth and self-deceit … the strange dualism that allows loving fathers to serve tyranny by day and to tuck their children up at night.”
Luke Harding, author of Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West in The Guardian