Year of Night

In the chaos of Revolutionary Russia, 18-year-old Nadia Serova is forced to flee with false papers provided by her mysterious ‘Uncle Igor’, a charismatic photographer. Igor confesses that he is a key member of ‘The Trust’ – a secret anti-Bolshevik organisation run from the heart of the Kremlin, known only as ‘Moscow’. Igor recruits her as his partner and they swear a blood oath of allegiance. In Paris, they join a flood of White Russian émigrés: officers, philosophers, poets, bohemians and former aristocrats who haunt Montparnasse and Billancourt, scraping a living, quarrelling and living in a hotbed of gossip and conspiracies as they plot the inevitable Bolshevik collapse, and their return.

Nadia befriends Arensky, a former White general, secretly creating an anti-Bolshevik force; at the same time, she meets Alyosha, who dreams of uniting both Reds and Whites. Her relationship with Igor becomes more intense; she becomes his muse and then his mistress, although he flaunts his relationship with his former lover. As the ‘Moscow’ organisation increase pressure for action, and violence stalks the streets of Paris, Nadia realises she might be at the centre of a web not of her making. For who is Igor really? And what are his real intentions?

“I have been in love with the Russian language and Russian literature since I was a teenager. I was working on another novel when I had an image of a young girl in a railway station. The picture my imagination threw up was so vivid that I had to start writing about her, to find out who she was and how she got there. This led to a year of reading, researching, and exploring Paris, while the story grew. I was not only exploring my roots; I was inventing them. This is the first book I have written that was set in a period outside my own, and I was enthralled by the idea of living in the past and making it present,” says Kate, of her inspiration for the book. A £1 donation from each paperback will go to St Gregory's aid to disadvantaged in Russia and the former Soviet Union.