Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith

Wow. Convoluted. Takes place over the course of 30 years, from the visit to the USSR of a black American singer in the early 50s, to New York City 15 years later, to 1980 in Afghanistan. I really wanted to like Leo, but he really annoyed the crap out of me in this book. There were a lot of rather unbelievable situations here, but the story is pretty good.

"Agent 6" shows up early in the book, but under his actual name. It's not till the last 50 or so pages that we find out who that name refers to. And the end....what the heck? I don't even know what to say about it.

Apricot Jam, and Other Stories, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I mostly snagged this so I can say I have read Solzhenitsyn, even if it's not one of his famous publications. These stories are good snapshots of a certain time and place (pre-1950, post-Revolutionary Soviet Union) and while they differ in major details, they are similar in tone. The tone is dismal, somewhat cynical, and angry at the corruption of the country that continued after the fall (and murder) of the Tsar. Nothing changed, except that different people were running things, and poor people still starved.

I didn't finish all the stories. I got through two that were more-or-less centered on the Eastern Front during World War II, and just couldn't swallow anymore. I wouldn't have made it that far if I didn't know some history of the era, though. The most memorable one for was a very depressing story about a young idealistic college graduate trying to teach Russian literature to children; every year the curriculum changes, the ideology changes, the list of "allowed" authors changes...horrible.

Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (on CD)

Great book. Seriously: if you want to know how it felt to live under Stalin--at both ends of his 'career' in power--Smith does a great job in creating the claustrophobic fear and paranoia of the era.

Yes, it's a bit of a rip-off of a couple of real-life characters, and it's impossibly unrealistic in a couple of suspense scenes (the train one is especially egregious), and the plot is unnecessarily convoluted in a couple of respects, but I loved listening to it.

Will have to see if he's written any other books....