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| Version 1 | Version 2 |
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| One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review | One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| The prize-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore draws on a true story for his second novel, set in Moscow just after the second world war and peopled with both real and fictional characters. A mix of thriller, love story and historical fiction, it follows the lives of a group of schoolchildren – "little barons", Stalin calls them, because they are the offspring of some of Russia's most important leaders. | The prize-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore draws on a true story for his second novel, set in Moscow just after the second world war and peopled with both real and fictional characters. A mix of thriller, love story and historical fiction, it follows the lives of a group of schoolchildren – "little barons", Stalin calls them, because they are the offspring of some of Russia's most important leaders. |
| Attending Moscow's most exclusive school, they form a Pushkin-inspired club, the Fatal Romantics, and swear to "live for love and romance". But when a play-acting duel goes wrong and two of them die, their club is discovered and condemned as "bourgeois sentimentalism", the children – some as young as six – are arrested and imprisoned, and Stalin's inquisitors embark on a witch-hunt. | Attending Moscow's most exclusive school, they form a Pushkin-inspired club, the Fatal Romantics, and swear to "live for love and romance". But when a play-acting duel goes wrong and two of them die, their club is discovered and condemned as "bourgeois sentimentalism", the children – some as young as six – are arrested and imprisoned, and Stalin's inquisitors embark on a witch-hunt. |
| Sebag Montefiore's knowledge of the period helps him bring 1945 Moscow to bleak, fascinating life, its "crumbling buildings… drab, beige, peeling, khaki, grey". He reanimates historical figures to unsettling effect, from Stalin himself to his dissolute son Vasily, and, most disturbingly, Beria, "his green-grey man-breasts hanging pendulously like a camel's buttocks". But One Night in Winter is more than a recreation of history: by turns engrossing and upsetting, Sebag Montefiore makes his cast of children both hopelessly romantic – "If we cannot live with love, we choose death" – and hopelessly moving. | Sebag Montefiore's knowledge of the period helps him bring 1945 Moscow to bleak, fascinating life, its "crumbling buildings… drab, beige, peeling, khaki, grey". He reanimates historical figures to unsettling effect, from Stalin himself to his dissolute son Vasily, and, most disturbingly, Beria, "his green-grey man-breasts hanging pendulously like a camel's buttocks". But One Night in Winter is more than a recreation of history: by turns engrossing and upsetting, Sebag Montefiore makes his cast of children both hopelessly romantic – "If we cannot live with love, we choose death" – and hopelessly moving. |
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