Traces the journalist author's investigation into his own family history, during which he discovered how his grandparents were individually arrested and ultimately executed by the KGB, his mother and aunt were separated and miraculously reunited, and his parents were harassed and deported from Russia. 40,000 first printing.
Owen Matthews was born in London and spent part of his childhood in America. He studied modern history at Oxford University before beginning his career as a journalist in Bosnia. In 1995 he accepted a job at the Moscow Times, a daily English-language newspaper, and soon thereafter discovered his grandfather's file. In 1997 he became a correspondent at Newsweek magazine in Moscow, where he covered the second Chechen war. He was one of the first journalists to witness the start of U.S. bombing in the Panshir Valley in Afghanistan after 9/11, and covered the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He is currently Newsweek's bureau chief in Moscow, where he lives with his wife and two children.