Katherine accompanies her husband Stephen, a political journalist for a British newspaper, when he’s sent to Moscow. There she finds out that he’s interested more in his job than in her, Moscow frightens and bores her and so it doesn’t surprise that she falls for his Russian assistant Axel. A passionate love affair ensues.

Katherine helps him indeed, she leaves her daughter with friends in Munich and then travels, or rather flees, with Axel through West Germany, the GDR (German Democratic Republic) and Czechoslovakia to Prague - with the KGB always close to their heels.

On another level the novel is a love story, albeit a tricky one. Although Katherine and Axel haven’t seen each other for ten years, the magic is still there. The problem is, however, that Axel knows everything about Katherine, in fact knew everything about her already before she came to Moscow. He was only officially Stephen‘s assistant but in reality he had been delegated by the KGB to watch over the foreigners and inform his bosses about their every step.

I find a third level as fascinating as the spy thriller and the love story, if not more so and that’s the setting. I chose the book because I had read that it was set in the period immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I want to know how foreign authors see my fatherland and I must admit that it also gives me pleasure to catch them out at making mistakes. How easy it is to stumble and fall if you research only from abroad. I can’t frame the author, though! It’s absolutely fascinating how she catches the turbulent period of the summer of 1990. She gets the atmosphere and the discussions in West Germany and the GDR right, down to the expressions people used then. Everything is so truthful and genuine as if she had been present herself, hats off!

Now that I’ve praised the novel, I must mention my complaint. The story is narrated by the two main characters in turns in the first person perspective. Nothing can be said against this technique, it allows the author different points of view which highlight the difficulty of understanding each other. Unfortunately, she isn’t capable of giving Katherine and Axel different voices! Each chapter starts with the name of the character who’s talking, but I read fast and sometimes overlooked the name. When I came to the first ‘I’, it could happen that for some paragraphs I didn’t know who was talking. Had the author used the third person perspective, she would have had to call the protagonists by their names, this would have made the story easier to follow and she could stick to one voice. Pity that the editor didn’t notice this.