Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books

Book Club: Damascus Station

SYNOPSIS

THIS superb debut novel by David McCloskey, a former CIA Analyst, is one of the most striking fictional thriller stories since Mick Herron’s magnificent Slow Horses in 2010.

Not only does it ooze authenticity, with some rather exacting details of what it takes to recruit someone to spy against their country (a charge of Treason), it also includes a love story to pierce the heart.

This is not the dark, anguished world of Greene or Le Carré, this is a brilliant evocation of the perils and dangers espionage poses to a young man who is not afraid to show emotion. It is set against the civil war in Syria.

CIA officer Sam Joseph is sent to Paris in the hope of recruiting Mariam Haddad, an official in the Palace of President Assad, with access to many systems and secrets. When the two meet, they fall in love, which brings the treacherous world of espionage into sharp focus. Who is to be trusted and by whom?

Painstakingly detailed and narrated, yet told with exceptional literary flair, it identifies McCloskey as an exciting new voice in espionage. Readers of Damascus Station should relish every page, the story demands it.

– Damascus Station by David McCloskey is published by Swift, 432pp

Standard
Arts, Books, History

Book Club: The Ticket Collector from Belarus

SYNPOSIS

BRITAIN’S only war crimes trial began on February 9, 1999. The defendant at the Old Bailey was a 78-year-old former British Rail ticket collector known as Tony the Pole.

In fact, he was Andrei Sawoniuk, born in Domachevo, now part of Belarus. When the Nazis arrived there in 1941, Sawoniuk was quick to join their cause.

Among the crimes he was accused of was the killing of 15 Jewish women. The prosecution witnesses included Sawoniuk’s former childhood friends, whose families were murdered by the Nazis.

Convicted and sentenced to life, Sawoniuk died six years later. Based on interviews with survivors and witnesses, this is a moving and compelling account of the meticulous workings of the legal system in the face of crimes no less terrible for having been committed so long ago.

– The Ticket Collector from Belarus is co-authored by Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson. Published by S&S, 384pp

. Recommended

Standard
Arts, Books, History, Russia, Ukraine

Book Review: Overreach

RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Intro: Owen Matthews is a writer with close family ties to Russia, but a disturbing portrait of the Russian president’s propaganda is swallowed whole by his own people. The Russian despot’s lies are working. Overreach is the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine

READERS of foreign affairs’ news will know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles and pieces he has written about Russia and Ukraine.

But his book on the war now raging between those two countries – an act of pure and vicious choice by President Putin – reveals for the first time the depth of his own family’s involvement in the complex background of conflicting national identities.

Or as he puts it: “We all like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood.” For Matthews’ mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominately Russian-speaking city, at the heart of the Ukrainian territories Putin is determined to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now, legally, Ukrainian land.

Yet as Matthews goes on to explain: “The Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial role in Ukraine, first as servants of the Tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of Soviet power. Whether I like it or not my family history – my blood – is intimately linked not only to Ukraine and Russia but to the history of the Russian Empire.”

Although Putin is widely regarded as being highly motivated by a desire to reassemble the Soviet Union – and the secession of Ukraine in 1991 marked the end for the USSR – the Russian president sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great, who brought most of Ukraine under the Kremlin’s rule.

And, as Matthews recounts, his ancestor, Captain Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov, was “one of the Russian officers who accompanied the empress on her first imperial progress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine”.

Click on page 2 to continue reading

Pages: 1 2
Standard