ARCHANGEL

 

With Fatherland and Enigma, Robert Harris has established himself as Britain's most successful and imaginative thriller writer.

Present day Russia is the setting for his stunning new novel Archangel

Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives.

One night Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook.

Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story. But what starts as an idle enquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across night-time Moscow and up to northern Russia - to the vast forests near the White Sea port of Archangel, where the final secret of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century.

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'Archangel is Harris's strongest book yet, confirming him as the leading current exponent of the intelligent literary thriller'

The Times

'The best thriller for years'

Sunday Telegraph

'His best yet: a fast-paced thriller, pulsing with suspense'

Sunday Times

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Robert Harris, was a reporter on the BBC's Panorama and Newsnight programmes before becoming Political Editor of the Observer in 1987, and then a columnist on the Sunday Times.  His five non-fiction books include Selling Hitler (1986), an account of the forging of Hitler's diaries.

Fatherland (1992) was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel prize, and was followed by Enigma (1995). His novels have sold six million copies world wide and have been translated into 30 languages.

He lives in Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby, and their three young children.

 

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"Kelso set his jaw and nose, by force of will, through all the stages of human evolution - from the slime of the floor, to his hands and knees, to a kind of shuffling, simian crouch - and propelled himself into the empty bedroom"

• Robert Harris on the writing of Archangel
• Locate Archangel with Microsoft Expedia
• The Washington Post has the weather there - pretty cool
• Some pictures of the city
• Stalin quotes

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