"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."

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Luke Harding, author of Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West in The Guardian