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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.

Connect with Owen
Website | X/Twitter

My Week in Books – 12th October 2025

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On the blog last week

Tuesday – I went off-piste for this week’s Top Ten Tuesday with Books Featuring Storms.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading.

Thursday – I shared my publication day review of Dominion of Dust by Matthew Harffy.

Friday – I published my review of Tombland by C. J. Sansom.

New on my shelves

Henley Literary Festival and the town’s Oxfam bookshop have a lot to answer for…

Ravenglass by Carolyn Kirby (Northodox Press)

In 18th century Whitehaven, Kit Ravenglass grows up in a house of secrets. A shameful mystery surrounds his mother’s death, and his formidable, newly rich father is gambling everything on shipping ventures. Kit takes solace in his beloved sister Fliss, and her sumptuous silks, although he knows better than to reveal his delight in feminine fashion. As the family’s debts mount, Kit’s father turns to the transatlantic slave trade – a ruthless and bloody traffic to which more than a fortune might be lost.

Adventures will see Kit turn fugitive and begin living as ‘Stella,’ before being swept into the heady violence of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion. Driven by love, revenge and a desire to live truly and freely, Kit must find a way to survive these turbulent times – and to unravel the tragic secrets of the Ravenglass family.

The Other Side of Paradise by Vanessa Beaumont (Magpie)

London 1921. Jean Buckman, a young and innocent American heiress arrives in England to find a society decimated by war but resolutely clinging to the status quo. She marries Edward Warre an engaging but complex man and the owner of a once great but now struggling estate.

As the marriage falters, Jean spends her summers in the South of France where she embarks on a passionate affair that will have repercussions for the rest of her life.

Two sons arrive, the oldest, heir to the estate, is not the true bloodline. But Edward needs Jean’s money to survive, and she needs her husband’s silence.

Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (Canongate)

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen — Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs — sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice’s estranged daughter (or is she?), Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there.

This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals and serial exiles, rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today.

Room 706 by Ellie Levenson (ARC, Headline Review)

When asked what matters to her the most, Kate would, of course, say her children and her husband. Because she loves her life. Even when it involves making a costume late into the night, scouring the supermarket for the only bread rolls her children will eat, and working during any spare moment in between. And she has found the way to hang onto her sanity in the Hours stolen away, once every few months, to have sex with another man.

Until one such rendezvous when Kate turns on the television to discover that the very London hotel they’re in has been taken under siege. And with that, she knows that nothing will ever be the same.

In the confines of a room with everything at stake, Kate is left to contemplate what has led her here, in hiding with a man who is not her husband while her beloved family waits at home.

Female, Nude by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (ARC, Tinder Press)

Sophie, a painter, is holidaying with friends in a stunning villa in Greece – her best friend Helena is shortly to be married, and this is the last time she and her friends will be together as single women. But life has treated them so differently since their university days, that Sophie is questioning everything about their friendship. Meanwhile her partner, Greg, is desperate for them to try for a baby, but she wants to devote herself to her art – and there are other, deeper forces, pulling the two of them in opposite directions.

In the course of the holiday, Sophie paints a nude portrait of her friend Alessia, and becomes involved in an intense affair with Ky, who lives and works on the island. Both the painting, and the affair, will challenge everything Sophie thinks she knows, about art, about motherhood, about sex – and about how and with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, trans. by Philip Gabriel (Vintage)

When a young man’s girlfriend vanishes, he sets his heart on finding the imaginary city where her true self lives. His search will lead him to take a job in a remote library with mysteries of its own.

When he finally makes it to the city, he finds his beloved working in a different library – a dream library. But she has no memory of their life together and, as the lines between reality and fantasy start to blur, he must decide what he’s willing to lose.

The Prime Ministers: Harold Wilson by Alan Johnson (Swift Press)

Harold Wilson was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. Prime Minister from 1964-70, and again from 1974-76, he won four elections as well as a referendum on UK membership of the European Community. The achievements of the Wilson Era – from legalising homosexuality to protecting ethnic minorities, from women’s rights to the Open University – radically improved ordinary people’s lives for the better.

In Harold Wilson, former Labour cabinet minister and bestselling author Alan Johnson presents a portrait of a truly twentieth-century man, whose ‘white heat’ speech proclaimed a scientific and technological revolution – and who was as much a part of the sixties as the Beatles and the Profumo scandal.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street, and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream.

When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?

Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

What I’m currently reading

I’m reading Our London Lives from my NetGalley shelf, The Assassin of Verona from my TBR pile and I’m listening to the audiobook of Transcription.

Look out for…

  • Book Review: Andropov’s Cuckoo by Owen Jones
  • Book Review: The Mare by Angharad Hampshire