On 7 December 2006, in a Highgate Cemetery drenched with London rain, a Russian was buried within a stone’s throw of the grave of Karl Marx. He was Alexander Litvinenko, Sasha to his friends, a boy from the deep Russian provinces who rose through the ranks of the world’s most feared security service. Litvinenko was the man who denounced murder and corruption in the Russian government, fled from the wrath of the Kremlin, came to London and took the shilling of Moscow’s avowed enemy … Now he was a martyr, condemned by foes unknown to an agonised death in a hospital bed thousands of miles from home. Martin Sixsmith draws on his long experience as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, and contact with key London-based Russians, to dissect Alexander Litvinenko’s murder. Myriad theories have been put forward since he died, but the story goes back to 2000 when hostilities were declared between the Kremlin and its political opponents. This is a war that has blown hot and cold for over seven years; a war that has pitted some of Russia’s strongest, richest men against the most powerful president Russia has had since Josef Stalin. The Litvinenko File is a gripping, powerful inside account of a shocking act of murder, when Russia’s war with itself spilled over onto the streets of London and made the world take notice.

In the looking glass world of the old Soviet reality, the future is certain. But the past is unpredictable and the truth a negotiable commodity. Into this changeable environment comes young Zhenya Gorevich, struggling to embrace a supposed Communist utopia. When his mother confesses the unlikely secret of his parentage, he determines to escape Russia and find his long-lost father. On a pillock’s progress, as trying as anything endured by Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, the hapless Gorevich journeys from his dreary home town of Vitebsk to Moscow and, eventually, to swinging London and the 1966 World Cup in an effort to reclaim his birthright. Culminating with the 1966 World Cup in England, Martin Sixsmith delightfully combines the riotous tradition of Russian satire with his own wry humour in the story of one man’s circuitous journey through life.