THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: "Narrative that is direct, candid, unpretentious.
Cold War Best Seller Autobiography
The Full True Story of Joseph Stalin's young ‘mozho’, spy, Nora Murray
A young cold war ‘mozho’ girl’s best seller autobiography. Nora became that spy when Joseph Stalin’s brutal secret police wrecked her privileged childhood, making her homeless with the loss of friends, mother and then father. Utterly alone, good times in the Ukraine over and made to consort with British diplomats, she fell in love amidst Nazi Germany’s WWII invasion of Moscow and her struggle to catch up and escape together, inexplicably sanctioned by Stalin’s wife, on the last boat out.
A member of a highly privileged caste in Soviet society… reduced to a ‘mozho’ girl mixing with foreigners, with instructions to report on them… the real story is in the simple, graphic and almost entirely persuasive account of her observations – some amusing and others horribly or pitifully gruesome."
In the unforgiving WWII climate of 1940, 21-year old Nora is faced with a perilous ultimatum: Enlist with Stalin’s secret police as a honey trap, or face the death of her family. Despairingly she agrees.
Nora finds herself struggling to seduce her target, John Murray, a British Embassy cypher in Moscow.
As two disparate lives intertwine, their desperate escape leads the couple through frozen Arctic wastelands, clutching forged papers and hopes not just for survival but for a future together.
