Visceral and thought provoking, powerful and emotional, haunting and heartbreaking, The Dictator's Wife will hold you in its grip until its gut-wrenching conclusion. Now I was here, on behalf of the woman whose husband had controlled it all. How much had she known? How tainted was she, and therefore how tainted was I by association?”

Institute of Organic Chemistry (Romanian Academy) in Bucharest built in the 1970s. Source: socialistmodernism.com I found myself reading faster and faster to get to the end, to find out Laura and Marija’s fates, what happens? You will have to see, innocent or not, you won’t be able to look away! You will be held spellbound by The Dictators Wife. For Laura, the case has a personal meaning. Her mother has never spoken of the horrors she witnessed under the old regime, and remains a shadow of the woman she used to be. As Laura prepares for the trial, she realises that to find the truth, she must enter the web of the dictator's wife. But what secrets lie within? As the novel’s cover suggests, this is a boldly visual novel. I won’t be surprised to see it turned into a film or Netflix series. I, for one, can easily imagine Cate Blanchett as the Dictator’s Wife. In 1989 Popa, the Dictator of a (fictional) communist country Yanussia is executed when the country has a revolution.At times the book was claustrophobic and gave the reader a truly dark restricted atmosphere that really added an extra layer of slightly experiencing the opression and horror of a dictator regime. It was both completely terrifying and captivating in equal measure

It’s definitely a book that requires concentration, but the characters and atmosphere of the book is tremendously written which makes it addictive reading. She cites the recent news of Melania Trump launching a non-fungible token (NFT) – a watercolour depicting her eyes. “She called it ‘an amulet to inspire’ and I thought that was actually a perfect representation of Melania’s time in power because it’s a thing, but it’s not a thing. It’s not something you can touch. It’s a representation, an empty emblem, a hollow image, and that felt like a microcosm of her time as first lady,” explains Berry. The "trial" that sealed the Ceausecus' fate was perhaps the perfect foil for the decades of falsification and fraud that defined Elena's scientific career. Behr calls the proceedings "farcical" and it is clear that the prosecutors were performing an act of restitution that the entire nation desperately needed. When the Ceausescus set out for a state visit to the United States in 1978, Elena was offered an honorary membership at the Illinois Academy of Sciences (IAS). However, nothing less than recognition from a Washington-based institute would satisfy her. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former chief of Romania's foreign intelligence service and author of the book Red Horizons: The True Story of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescus' Crimes, Lifestyle, and Corruption, Elena was livid:I felt in thrall to Marija reading this, she is addictive. It’s an intoxicating read and deliciously good. Berry keeps you just off kilter enough to make you feel like you are the one being watched, it is outstanding! The legal defence team for the former First Lady, who is on trial for a myriad of corruption charges and faces the death penalty if found guilty, includes two Yanussian expats, both of whom have been selected for the case based upon their nationality – by the former First Lady. This is a complex story of displacement, both at the national and the personal level. It’s fraught with fear, of the sort that is unknown to those of us who have not lived under a communist rule. The author has recreated this sense of dark urgency, it descends over you while reading like a suffocation as you feel the terror of living with the secrets of the past, secrets that are still too dangerous to reveal. An unconventional legal thriller and absorbing debut that is as satisfyingly complex in both its plotting and moral conclusions’ EXPRESS She isn’t a person, she’s a puppeteer. She discovers what you are, what you can and cannot bear, and uses it.’

Most of the novel is set in 1993 when Laura Lazarescu, a young London lawyer of Yanussian descent, travels to Yanussia as part of the legal team called in to defend Marija Popa, wife of the former dictator, Constantin Popa. Marija is charged with money laundering, bribery, fraud and corruption. The story is book-ended by events in 2018, when Marija dies and Laura reflects on earlier events. The story is told in the first person by Laura.Set in the fictional country of Yanussia, Marija Popa, wife of the dead former leader, is set to stand trial. She is accused of being complicit in her husband’s actions but declares herself to be innocent of all the charges that are piling up against her. She seeks out a defence team from England comprised of two of her fellow Yanussians. Laura has not stepped foot in her native country since she was a child; her parents never speak of their time in Yanussia and Laura is desperate to find out what happened to them, and specifically to her mother, to make their relationship so strained when she became a teenager. Is Marija telling the truth? Is she as innocent as she proclaims to be? Through the eyes of another, we are offered a window on the titular character. And those eyes may not be the most reliable, even if she is a lawyer. Laura bookends her own narrative by attending the funeral of Marija Popa, once wife of a dictator, both vilified and adored in her own right, a contentious public figure that Laura herself had dealings with earlier in her life. Through her work as a financial and political journalist, Freya Berry was inspired by watching the wives of dictators and strongmen – particularly Melania Trump during the US election in 2016. These women often carry with them an air of detachment, an aloofness that can come across as cold and indifferent, sometimes even calculating. Marija, the dictator’s wife of the title, certainly seems to be all of these things, though she’s so much more – as Laura soon discovers. Marija has a magnetic allure that Laura can’t resist, even though she knows she’s being lured into the spider’s trap. There’s a power play going on between these two women and whilst for much of the novel it feels as if Marija is the one in control, Laura has an innate tenacity that makes her willing to do whatever it takes to dig out the truth – even if it hurts her irrevocably in the process.

A gripping, intelligent, utterly-of-the-moment thriller’EMMA STONEX, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamplighters

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Die Traumkarriere Der Elena Ceausescu.” Mdr.De, 5 Mar. 2018, https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/elena-ceausescu-100.html. Elena's rise to the top ranks of academic chemists was, subsequently, smooth. Publications steadily appeared under the name of Professor Doctor Engineer Elena Ceaucescu. It was easy for her to find scientists to publish studies and books in her name; they did not have much of a choice and were handsomely rewarded for their work. An entire organization was involved in translating and distributing "her" works. She never wrote a thing herself during her entire life.