THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: Narrative that is direct, candid, unpretentious. A member of a highly privileged caste in Soviet society… reduced to a 'mozho' girl mixing with foreigners, with instructions to report on them… the real story is in the simple, graphic and almost entirely persuasive account of her observations - some amusing and others horribly or pitifully gruesome.In the unforgiving WWII climate of 1940, 21-year old Nora is faced with a perilous ultimatum: Enlist with Stalin's secret police as a honey trap, or face the death of her family. Despairingly she agrees. Nora finds herself struggling to seduce her target, John Murray, a British Embassy cypher in Moscow.As two disparate lives intertwine, their desperate escape leads the couple through frozen Arctic wastelands, clutching forged papers and hopes not just for survival but for a future together.

Nora's métier was writing and as such she felt at one with the tools of that trade. Forever writing letters and making entries in her diary, a consummate Lady of Letters, her book would allow her to express her distaste for totalitarian regimes and the love of Mother Russia.Nora was a bubbly intelligent optimist who throughout her life would find the best in people. With her indomitable Russian spirit she would never take 'no' for an answer; enabling her, in overcoming insurmountable obstacles, to escape and survive the devastations of her war torn country.