Sashenka

by Simon Montefiore

Winter, 1916: In St Petersburg, Russia on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Young Ladies, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar’s secret police…

Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.

Twenty years on, Sashenka has a powerful husband with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, but her own family is safe. But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair which will have devastating consequences.

Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heart-breaking tale of passion and betrayal, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism - and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice.

(From Publisher).

Simon Montefiore’s ancestors escaped from the Tsarist Empire at the turn of the century, and sparked his lifelong interest in Russia.

As a correspondent in the early 1990s, he covered the wars and turbulence of the fall of the Soviet Union - from Georgia and Chechnya to Moscow and St Petersburg. As a historian, he has spent the last ten years researching the Russian archives. The personal stories he found there and his interviews with families helped inspire this novel.

His history books, Catherine the Great & Potemkin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar have been acclaimed bestsellers in over 30 languages. Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Prize and the LA Times Book Prize.

Born in 1965, Simon Montefiore lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children.