In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits
by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block.
He waits all through the night, expecting to
be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity
he has known in the previous decade is no
use to him now. And few who are taken to
the Big House ever return.
So begins Julian Barnes's first novel since
his Man Booker-winning The Sense of an
Ending. A story about the collision of Art
and Power, about human compromise
human cowardice and human courage,
it is the work of a true master.