1967: Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, shocks the World by defecting to the USA, in the midst of the Cold War - leaving behind her 21 year old son and 16 year old daughter.

American lawyer, Peter Horvath has been sent by the CIA to accompany her, as she arrives in New York to a media frenzy. The people of her adopted country are hungry to hear her story, but she is convinced that she just wants to live as an ordinary American, not a celebrity.

Svetlana is a complicated character and soon becomes disillusioned with the life she has chosen. She reaches out to Peter Horvath and as their relationship develops, something blossoms between them - even though he is married.

The Red Daughter recreates the struggles of this extraordinary, troubled woman's search for a new life and a place to belong.

This book is fascinating. Although this is a fictionalised account of the life of Stalin's daughter, John Burnham Swartz manages to weave the historical facts of her life into a compelling tale.

This is greatly enhanced by the fact that the author's own father was the lawyer who actually accompanied Svetlana to the USA, in real life. This allowed John Burnham Schwartz access to a great deal of research information - not to mention the stories of his father, who had a life-long friendship with her, although they did not have a romantic relationship.

I have to admit that I did not know that Stalin even had a daughter before hearing of this book, so I was particularly keen to read it and have found it incredibly interesting. How could I have not know about her? Admittedly, I was born in 1967, so would have been too young to remember the momentous occasion of her defection, but she did not die until 2011 and I cannot remember anything in the press about her then. Strange.

It is hard to imagine what it must have been like to be the daughter of a character such as Joseph Stalin, but this book goes someway towards understanding what her private life must have been like.
How could you ever distance yourself from your father's bloody legacy, and the general population's thirst for macabre details about your family?
I think the simple answer to this is that you cannot. Svetlana had a reputation as a complicated, headstrong and difficult woman, but I think all these go with the territory of being the daughter of someone so horribly infamous, whose shadow inevitably eclipsed her own identity.

The book takes the form of two narratives - that of Svetlana herself and of her lawyer, Peter - which give you a pretty good idea about Svetlana's life, and what motivated her to make the decisions she did - some of these horribly destructive ones.
Svetlana's narrative particularly rings true and allows you to develop a lot of sympathy for this poor woman, who never really fitted in. You follow her as she makes and then later regrets the decisions she has made, but you understand fully why she behaves the way she does. This is a woman desperate to find what is missing from her life, but she is never able to fulfill this wish. It is actually quite a tragic tale about a woman who could not escape the legacy of her family.

I found The Red Daughter completely fascinating, although there are some jumps forward in time that are a bit disorienting, particularly during her later years. However, this did not really detract from my enjoyment of the book. Highly recommended, particularly if you are fond of reading about the fallout from the Cold War years.

I was interested in the person who is in the centre of this book. Not knowing too much about her, I have decided to read this book to get some information. And that was quite successful, this book motivated me to research more and find more facts about this interesting character. That's what I like about novels, when they inspire me, in this case to learn more. The author's style is easy to read and good to understand. I consider it very successful how he managed to keep a female voice. Also the way he divides the book in different parts and shows the actions in different ways is interesting and well-done. What I didn't like or was missing were mostly two things. First, I don't understand why the sex of her last child had to be changed, I don't consider it necessary for a novel. Second I was hoping for more information from her life in the USSR. I can imagine, why the author didn't include it, but I am anyhow a bit disappointed.
Anhow I can recommend this book.

The Red Daughter has no doubt been a huge labour of love for the author, and it really shows in this exceptional hybrid biography/fiction. It is primarily a cleverly disguised account of one fearless woman and the life and times in which she lived. Svetlana Alliluyeva, notorious tyrannical leader Joseph Stalin's only daughter, managed to embarrass the Soviet Union by defecting in 1967 and becoming a naturalised citizen of their sworn enemy: the United States. This book mainly follows the defection and the time afterwards as she tries to settle and effectively start her life anew. It proves a difficult task with the struggles laid bare throughout the text.

Of course, Washington jumped at the chance to take her in most likely due to the invaluable information she may be willing to provide about the regime back in her homeland and the propaganda it would create. But it was also possible that she could be an agent of Moscow; a member of the KGB spying and feeding information back to help her father, but it appears they were willing to take that risk. Because this is primarily based in fact I found it incredibly fascinating; it's easy to see that Svetlana had courage and passion for what she believed in and the was a truly inspirational figure who was ahead of her time and burdened by her tricky heritage.

What makes John Burnham Schwartz an authority on Svetlana you ask? Well, when travelling from Russia to the US in secret she needed an escort, and that escort came in the form of CIA agent, Peter Horvath; the author's father, who became a very close and loyal confidant of Ms Alliluyeva. Based on his father's reminiscences as well as his own extensive research into Svetlana's life, John Burnham Schwartz recreates this dramatic story of a woman's search for a new life and a place to belong. Schwartz paints a compelling and eminently readable biography with evocative and imaginative prose that makes this both moving and absorbing. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Corsair for an ARC.

This historical novel looks at the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin. The author uses an unpublished memoir as the device to tell her story, which is really a loosely disguised biography. This memoir is left to Peter Horvath, who was sent to Switzerland to escort Svetlana to the United States, when she defected.

Although Stalin is, obviously, the reason why Svetlana is of historical interest, the character herself remembers her mother as central to her childhood. She was, of course, the most famous Cold War defector and it is interesting to read of the horror of the airline pilot when he discovers she is aboard, for fear that the Russians will do something to prevent them arriving in the US.

However, arrive in America, Svetlana does; albeit without her two children, who she leaves behind. This is not only her story, but that of Peter’s and of the relationship that he shares with her. This is a very moving, and interesting account, of an amazing life, with much of the emphasis on the time following her defection to the US; although her early life is covered. Svetlana seems quite lost at times and you do feel a huge amount of sympathy for her and the burden of her heritage. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.