Category: HF Reading Challenge

About the Book

Two girls, born thousands of miles apart in Kazakhstan and Japan just after World War II, meet and are like peas in a pod. They also get on like sisters and keep in touch for the rest of their lives.

However, one wants to help her battle-scarred country and the other wants to leave hers for the West. They dream up a daring, dangerous plan to achieve both goals, which Andropov, the chief of the Soviet KGB, is told about. He dubs it Operation Youriko and it is set in motion, but does it have even the remotest chance of success?

Format: Paperback (236 pages) Publisher: Megan Publishing Services
Publication date: 17th February 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

William, knowing he is nearing the end of his life, has one last task he wants to complete. It’s to set down the story of the most amazing person he ever met, a brilliant Soviet linguist named Natalya Petrovna Myrskii, a young woman whom he knew as Youriko.

Born in 1949 in Kazakhstan, then part of the Soviet Union, Natalya’s bears a striking resemblance to her Japanese friend Yui. They become like twin sisters, able to adopt identical mannerisms and modes of speech, often for sheer fun or to trick others. Yui obtains a job in the Ministry of Finance. But it’s a role she finds utterly boring, with a year to go until she can apply to join the Foreign Office and the possibility of a foreign posting. But Yui’s ultimate dream is to move to the West. It sparks a daring plan: they will swap identities. Natalya will take Yui’s place and pass information back to the KGB and Yui will receive enough money to start a new life in Canada.

So Natalya becomes the ‘little cuckoo in the nest’ of Head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov. Natalya’s mother hopes the success of the operation will gain her preferment within the Communist Party. For Natalya it starts as an adventure, a challenge to see if she can pull it off. However, after one particular incident, she begins to be concerned at the real life consequences of the material she is passing back and starts providing lower grade information.

It’s not a good move. She soon discovers in the most brutal way possible how the Soviet Union punishes those who do not perform to expectations. Even more shocking is the act of betrayal that accompanies it. What follows is an incredibly powerful but disturbing depiction of life in a Soviet labour camp where physical and sexual abuse is an everyday experience for female prisoners, and many die from exhaustion, disease or starvation. Eventually released, having ‘learned her lesson’, Natalya is given another mission, one which she finds distasteful, but has no option but to undertake. ‘She only had one goal – to stay out of the camps, and the only way she had of doing that was by pleasing her masters.’

It’s at this moment that she meets William, a British exchange student, and suddenly she glimpses another possible future for herself. But how to make it happen? I won’t say much more except that it is full of danger and will take determination, resilience and a generous helping of good fortune.

It’s a remarkable story. What makes it even more remarkable is that it’s based on fact and that the author himself has a role in the story.

Andropov’s Cuckoo is an enthralling mixture of history, spy thriller and love story.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of the author.

In three words: Fascinating, dramatic, intriguing

About the Author

Owen Jones was born in Barry, South Wales. While studying Russian in the USSR in the ’70’s, he hobnobbed with spies on a regular basis and, in Suriname, he got caught up in the 1982 coup. He has written fifty novels and novellas and speaks seven languages. He now lives in Thailand with his Thai wife of seventeen years.

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