Part two of this review is here.
Sam Golod’s heroine, Natalie, is a young English woman spending a post-degree year in St Petersburg in 1992, in the chaos of uncertainty and reckless opportunity of that astonishing time of state collapse.
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Part one of this review is here, part three is here,
As readers of this blog know, the reviews here have a two-fold focus —what is the book like? And what about its representation of Russia in fiction?
Sam Golod is a novel with a strong sense of time and place. It is set in St Petersburg in the early 1990s.
Part two of this review is here.
Sophia Creswell’s Sam Golod (1996) is one of those works written by English writers who spent time in Russia during the extraordinary 1990s and sought to describe in prose those searingly memorable years.
Part one of this review is here.
Jason Matthews comes to espionage fiction as a member of the ‘former spy’ school of writers. He is ex-CIA. The backcover blurb on Red Sparrow has veteran US thriller writer Nelson DeMille proclaiming that
Jason Matthews is not making it up; he has lived this life and this story, and it shows on every page.
Nelson De Mille, on Red Sparrow
Part two of this review is here.
Jason Matthews was a newcomer to the spy fiction genre when Red Sparrow was published in 2013. Within five years, Red Sparrow was the first in the Dominika Egorova trilogy and was a movie starring Jennifer Lawrence, replete with graphic violence and what are best described as ‘scenes of a sexual nature’.
(Part one of this review is here)
The Spike is structured around the story of an American journalist, Bob Hockney, who travels the path from youthful mould-breaker, through celebrated scoop getter, to dedicated truth seeker.
(Part two of this review is here)
Writing this in 2020, I could be describing a Russia-related thriller of the most up-to-date nature, instead of a novel written four decades ago.