"Black Sun is fascinating and has fearsome authenticity."—Frederick Forsyth, #1 New York Times bestselling author"Thrilling and suspenseful." —Simon Sebeag Montefiore, New York Times bestselling author of The Romanovs"To call the novel chilling is an understatement."—Booklist (starred review)It is the dawn of the 1960s. In order to investigate the gruesome death of a brilliant young physicist, KGB officer Major Alexander Vasin must leave Moscow for Arzamas-16, a top-secret research city that does not appear on any map. There he comes up against the brightest, most cutthroat brain trust in Russia who, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev himself, are building a nuclear weapon with 3,800 times the destructive potential of the Hiroshima bomb. RDS-220 is a project of such vital national...

A page-turning thriller about two competing KGB operatives on a race across Russia and against time to uncover the devastating truth behind the assassination of JFK.1963. In a desolate Russian penal colony, the radio blares the news of President Kennedy’s death. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin’s new post as director of a gulag camp in the middle of a frozen tundra is far from a promotion. This is where disgraced agents, like Vasin, are sent to disappear and die quietly. But when tensions in the camp mount and a violent revolt breaks out, Vasin finds himself on the run with a mysterious prisoner holding the most dangerous secret in the world: who ordered the murder of President Kennedy.In a breathless chase that leads them throughout the Soviet Union, from the barren Siberian wastelands, to the stunning halls of the Catherine Palace, and into the gritty streets of Leningrad and Moscow, Vasin must stay one step ahead of the deadliest spy and police...

The thrilling true story of Richard Sorge – the man John le Carré called 'the spy to end spies', and whose actions turned the tide of the Second World War Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born of a German father and a Russian mother in Baku in 1895, he moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. A member of the angry and deluded generation who found new, radical faiths after their experiences on the battlefields of the First World War, Sorge became a fanatical communist – and the Soviet Union's most formidable spy. Like many great spies, Sorge was an effortless seducer, combining charm with ruthless manipulation. He did not have to go undercover to find out closely guarded state secrets – his victims willingly shared them. As a foreign correspondent, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society in the years leading up to and including the Second...

An astonishing investigation into the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war – from the corridors of the Kremlin to the trenches of Mariupol. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most serious geopolitical crisis since the Second World War – and yet at the heart of the conflict is a mystery. Vladimir Putin apparently lurched from a calculating, subtle master of opportunity to a reckless gambler, putting his regime – and Russia itself – at risk of destruction. Why? Drawing on over 25 years' experience as a correspondent in Moscow, as well as his own family ties to Russia and Ukraine, journalist Owen Matthews takes us through the poisoned historical roots of the conflict, into the Covid bubble where Putin conceived his invasion plans in a fog of paranoia about Western threats, and finally into the inner circle around Ukrainian president and unexpected war hero Volodimir Zelensky. Using the accounts of current and former insiders from the Kremlin and its propaganda machine, the testimony of...

An electrifying new thriller set during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, seen from a bone-chilling vantage point: somewhere off the Florida coastline, trapped aboard the claustrophobic confines of an isolated Soviet submarine with open orders to fire its nuclear payload. The year is 1962, and KGB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin is chasing a white elephant: the long-rumored existence of an American spy embedded at the highest echelon of Soviet power. In a wild-goose chase that has Vasin engaged in high-stakes espionage against a rival State agency, he first hears whispers of an ominous top-secret undertaking: Operation Anadyr.As tensions flare between Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy over Russian missiles hidden in Cuba, four Soviet submarines are ordered to make a covert run at the American blockade in the Caribbean—each sub carrying tactical ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads.Critically acclaimed novelist Owen...

5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . Eric Connelly is crumbling under the weight of his dad's expectations. He can't seem to live up to the "Connelly Man" standards—but when he meets the mysterious, free-spirited Jordan Grant, his dad's rules seem so much less important than they used to.Jordan and Eric—now "E"—join up with two of the most popular girls in school to combat their rich-kid boredom. But as Jordan seduces E further, the group starts to kill time in more nefarious ways. It's Jordan who escalates the pack's dares from mostly harmless jaunts like joyrides in boosted cars and Bling Ring–style luxury shoplifting sprees into more violent activities. Eric is intoxicated . . . swept up in the pack's activities, even as Paige and Haley start to have reservations about what they've been doing. When Jordan starts talking bigger—what's a little bomb building between friends?—E must decide if he's just too far down...

On a midsummer day in 1937, Boris Bibikov kissed his two daughters goodbye and disappeared. One of those girls, Lyudmila, was to fall in love with a tall young foreigner in Moscow at the height of the Cold War and embark on a dangerous and passionate affair. Decades later, a reporter in nineties Moscow, her son Owen Matthews pieces together his grandfather’s passage through the harrowing world of Stalin’s purges, and tells the story of his parents’ Cold War love affair through their heartbreaking letters and memories. Stalin’s Children is a raw, vivid memoir about a young man’s struggle to understand his parents’ lives and the history of the strange country in which they lived.

Adam Higgs is a loser, and he's not okay with it.But starting as a junior in a new high school seems like exactly the right time to change things. He brainstorms with his best friend, Brian: What will it take for him to take over Nixon Collegiate? Adam searches for the A-listers' weak spot and strikes gold when he gets queen bee Sara Bryant to pay him for doing her physics homework. One part nerd, two parts badass, Adam ditches his legit job and turns to full-time cheating. His clients? All the Nixon Collegiate gods and goddesses.But soon his homework business becomes a booze business, which becomes a fake ID business. Adam's popularity soars as he unlocks high school achievements left and right, from his first kiss to his first rebound hookup. But something else is haunting him—a dark memory from his past, driving him to keep climbing. What is it? And will he go too far?How to Win at High School's honest picture of high school hierarchy combines with...