Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt

Lead Fiction, Spring 2019: This thriller brilliantly evokes 1973 Moscow and a world of diplomacy and counter-espionage.Escaping failure as an undergraduate and a daughter, not to mention bleak 1970s England, Martha marries Kit – who is gay. Having a wife could keep him safe in Moscow in his diplomatic post. As Martha tries to understand her new life and makes the wrong friends, she walks straight into an underground world of counter-espionage.Out of her depth, Martha no longer knows who can be trusted.

‘A solid, well-crafted plot and paced just right to build the unease in the reader.’, ‘This is definitely a book I’ll recommend, and I’ll be looking forward to reading more from Sarah Armstrong too.’, ‘The atmosphere feels very real... a nostalgic hark back to a very different age. I thoroughly enjoyed it.’, ‘I loved this novel’s sense of place and the way it captures the Kafkaesque absurdities of Soviet life at the time... It also very deftly shows, like le Carré’s novels, that the lines between ‘them’ and ‘us’ are often very blurred.’, ‘A fascinating account of life in Soviet Russia... There are few traces of the conventional spy-fic plot, but it’s the tiny details seen from the young heroine’s point of view that impress.’

Sarah Armstrong is the author of four novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt and The Starlings of Bucharest. She is also the author of A Summer of Spying, a short non fiction work about her experience of jury service during the Covid-19 pandemic, authority, truth, and the surveillance we are all exposed to.She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing with the Open University. Sarah lives in Colchester with her husband and four children.