Category: Reading Challenges

Book Review – Andropov’s Cuckoo by Owen Jones @owen_author

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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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Book Review – Tombland by C. J. Sansom

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About the Book

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos.

The nominal king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, rules as Edward’s regent and Protector. In the kingdom, radical Protestants are driving the old religion into extinction, while the Protector’s prolonged war with Scotland has led to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

Matthew Shardlake has been working as a lawyer in the service of Henry’s younger daughter, the lady Elizabeth. The gruesome murder of one of Elizabeth’s distant relations, rumored to be politically murdered, draws Shardlake and his companion Nicholas to the lady’s summer estate, where a second murder is committed.

As the kingdom explodes into rebellion, Nicholas is imprisoned for his loyalty, and Shardlake must decide where his loyalties lie – with his kingdom, or with his lady?

Format: Audiobook (37h 41m) Publisher: Mantle
Publication date: 18th October 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I’ve been trying to read all the books longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction since I first started following the prize in 2017. This, the seventh book in the author’s Matthew Shardlake series, was longlisted in 2019.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading Tombland, not least because it’s a whopper. I listened to the audiobook which would take you three days to complete if you did it continuously. Needless to say I didn’t, so it took me more like three weeks. The Matthew Shardlake series is one of the few series where I’ve read all the books and – crucially – in the right order, starting back in 2013 with Dissolution. Having said that, it’s coming up for ten years since I read the previous book in the series, Lamentation, and it’s the first time I’ve consumed one as an audiobook. (Although very good, I did find Steven Crossley’s narration on the slow side so chose to increase the reading speed.)

The book starts off as a crime mystery with Shardlake tasked by Henry VIII’s younger daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, to investigate the gruesome murder of Edith, the wife of John Boleyn, a distant relation of Elizabeth’s mother Anne. John Boleyn has been accused of the crime and is set to stand trial at Norwich Assizes. He appears to have means, motive and opportunity, especially since his alibi for the night of the murder is questionable. But as Shardlake and his young assistant Nicholas Overton discover, there are others who might want Boleyn’s wife dead or want Boleyn found guilty of her murder, executed and his land forfeited. There’s also the mystery of Edith’s unexplained disappearance nine years earlier. Just where did she go and why did she return after all that time?

At this point, the story goes off at a tangent, a rather lengthy tangent it has to be said. Shardlake, Nicholas and Shardlake’s former assistant Jack Barak find themselves caught up in an uprising taking place in protest against the enclosure of common land and other grievances against the landowners. In Norfolk it’s led by the charismatic Robert Kett and the rebels soon establish a large camp outside Norwich, at the time England’s second largest city. Barak throws in his lot with the rebels while Nicholas, opposed to them, becomes a prisoner in Norwich Castle and Shardlake finds himself legal advisor to Kett, trying to mitigate the penalties inflicted on the gentry tried at the rebel’s makeshift court. Inwardly he has sympathy with the rebels’ cause but dare not make it public and, as he constantly reminds himself, he must ensure John Boleyn receives justice.

The events of the so-called Kett’s Rebellion are described in detail and is obviously the result of much research. I confess my interest waned at this point and I was eager to get back to the murder mystery, which the book eventually does.

There are also secondary plots involving Shardlake’s former servant Josephine and her husband, Barak’s wife’s continuing animosity towards Shardlake, and the increasing frailty of Shardlake’s longtime friend Guy.

The Shardlake of Tombland is feeling his age. There are frequent references to his aching back and the exhaustion he feels after days of travel. There is an elegaic quality to the book, although apparently the author was working on the next book at the time of his death. Although not my favourite of the series, Tombland definitely demonstrates the author’s ability to combine historical fact and fiction.

In three words: Intriguing, atmospheric, immersive
Try something similar: Sacrilege by S. J. Parris

About the Author

C J Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He achieved a BA and then a PhD in History from Birmingham University. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer. He combined both history and law in his debut novel Dissolution – which took readers into the dark heart of Tudor England in a gripping novel of monastic treachery and death. This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reigns of Henry VIII and young Edward VI, and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. C J Sansom died on 27th April 2024 aged 71.