Xan Smiley
Orphans of the USSR
The Shoemaker and His Daughter: One Ordinary Family’s Remarkable Journey from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia
By Conor O’Clery
Doubleday 357pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
It was a bit disconcerting to discover that an old friend, when I was a correspondent in Moscow back in the dying days of the Soviet Union, had been told by the KGB to spy on me. Some foreign correspondents, Zhanna Suvorova was darkly told, were ‘not what they seem’. They wanted to ‘damage our homeland’. She was warned, moreover, that if she did not cooperate, her permit to live in Moscow would be rescinded and she would fail her doctorate in linguistics.
As things turned out, Zhanna, an Armenian-Russian scholar, was able to resist such threats. Moreover, despite a host of obstacles, she married one of her language students, who happened to be Ireland’s most distinguished foreign correspondent, Conor O’Clery, moving with him to America after the Soviet Union collapsed. They eventually
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Heaven for him was being caressed by duchesses in gilded salons and entertaining royalty in his palatial mansion ... where he showed off his gemmed gewgaws and laced the cocktails with Benzedrine.'
Piers Brendon on the diaries of Chips Channon (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/he-played-sardines-with-the-aga-khan
'Like so many of Ishiguro’s human narrators ... Klara contains within herself divisions and contradictions, pockets of knowledge that she isn’t able to synthesise fully.'
@infomodernist reviews 'Klara and the Sun'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/our-virtual-friend
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review