It was all going swimmingly for these two and then last weekend, to put it bluntly, Sale and Gloucester got slapped. It's also a love story between two former lovers who are determined to foil a Russian plot that could potentially destroy much of Western economy. This makes for an unusual but enthralling blend of a highly topical scenario with an old-fashioned, civilised take on espionage, in which the hero’s version of coming in from the cold is getting back to translating Chekhov. I had ridden a horse through Scythian tombstones in the Altai, visited a former gulag on the White Sea and a winery on the Black Sea, and, in mid-January, flown across eight times zones to Yakutz in the Russian Far East, the coldest city on earth, where the average winter temperature is minus 50.

The Translator’s Russian Locations with Harriet Crawley The Translator’s Russian Locations with Harriet Crawley

The details of their work are convincing, as is the portrayal of Marina’s simultaneous devotion to Russia and hatred of the current regime and high-level corruption. This report highlighted the vulnerability to Russian attack of UK communication cables under the Atlantic. Almost half of people who voted for the SNP at the last general election do not plan to back the party again, according to a new poll. Clive, a man keen to remain in the background, is catapulted into a tight web of intrigue and espionage.I had spent the better part of 20 years in Russia, and I was hooked on the country and on its people. Harriet Crawley’s approach to international intrigue may be old school, but it’s also highly readable, drawing as it does on her own family background in intelligence, and above all on an insider’s love of a wonderfully realised Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and it definitely sets itself up for a sequel I would not hesitate to pick up. I liked that the main characters are not spies in the traditional sense, but are a translator and interpreter, one British and one Russian, thrown into an extraordinary situation. Moscow, centre of Russian power and a city I knew better than London, would be at the epicentre of my story.

The Translator: one of the top thrillers of 2023 and of the

At the Bolshoi, Marina drops a bombshell: she tells Clive she is ready to betray her country for a new life and promises top secret intelligence which might just derail Russia’s malevolent sabotage plans. Marina wants out but she has to have something to offer the British government and they want intelligence on something specific - the cutting of the Atlantic data cables.Clive Franklin is a Foreign Office translator, summoned at the last minute to accompany the British prime minister to a meeting with the Russian president. Clive Franklin, a Russian language expert in the Foreign Office, is summoned unexpectedly to Moscow to act as translator for the British Prime Minister.