In the historical note that concludes this gripping page-turner, Simon Sebag Montefiore insists that it is "not a novel about power, but about private life – above all, love". But he has set it in the last decade of Stalin's rule, its characters are members of the Soviet elite, and more than half of the action takes place in the shadow of the Lubyanka. We are in a world that Sebag Montefiore, the author of an award-winning history of Stalin's court, knows intimately, a world where private life is treated as a privilege. Romantic love is feasible (and there is lots of sex), but none of the main characters manages to evade the monstrous clutches of the state. Redemption was not really what Stalin's Moscow was all about.