Published 22nd April 2021 by Sandstone.
From the cover of the book:
The threats people hold over us are most often imagined. We even create them for ourselves.Ted moves to London to get away from the working-class community he was born into.
Hoping to train as a journalist, he moves to London and slides into debt. Things look up when he is given the opportunity to go to Romania to interview an art film director and then attend a Moscow film festival.
But others are watching him. And listening.
'The prose is beguiling - deceptively clean and simple - Alice Munro meets John le Carre [...] one of the finest books I have read this year. Haunting and resonant, I can't wait for the next book in the Moscow Wolves series.' --Fiona Erskine
'An enviable talent for location and detail.' --John Lawton
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1975: Ted is desperate to escape his working class roots, and the expectation that he will follow his father into the fishing industry in Harwich. Encouraged by praise for his writing skills, from one of his teachers during his formative years, Ted decides to have a stab at the life of a London journalist. London life is not quite what Ted had in mind though, and despite only rising to the dizzy heights of a seedy bedsit, he has got himself into debt, and has been driven to borrow money from his mother's holiday fund which he feels terrible about.
However, things are looking up, because Ted has managed to miraculously grab himself a job as a film reviewer for a small magazine, and has every intention of making a success of the role, despite his lack of experience. When he is offered the chance to head to Bucharest to interview a famous Romanian film director, Ted grabs the opportunity with both hands, but he soon discovers that things are far from easy for a Western journalist in an Eastern Bloc country at the height of the Cold War. Everyone is watched closely behind the Iron Curtain and treated with suspicion, but somehow Ted's naivety and the fact that he hails from the decadent West gets him noticed by the security services, which makes his first big break something of a disaster.
Although Ted's boss is not particularly happy with him when he returns to England, Ted is soon off again to report on a film festival even further into the lion's (or is it wolves?) den in the heart of Moscow. Since he has already become a person of interest in the eyes of the security sentinels, his movements are watched very closely by both sides as soon as he lands in the USSR. Ted is now, quite literally, in Cold War spy country and his life is about to get very complicated indeed...
The Starlings of Bucharest is the second novel in the Moscow Wolves series, and although different in feel to the first book, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt, it is every bit as wonderfully immersive. There is a lot more dark humour this time around (the security reports are a delight!) and we have a complex set up influenced by the goings on in both Romania and Russia to spice things up.
Sarah Armstrong has as wonderful way of dropping you right into the tense Cold War atmosphere of the 1970s, but she comes at her subject in a way I have not experienced before, and I like it! Her protagonists are not the usual characters you expect to see in an espionage yarn. In this case, Ted is completely unprepared for the reality of Moscow life with its threats, be they real or imagined, and he makes terrible blunders while trying to negotiate these strange surroundings, but he is also struck by the opportunities that exist for people with a working class background who want to prove themselves in the Communist world. This makes him ideal prey for those with an ideological agenda, especially the KGB - and it helps that he has a few money problems at the same time. Ted is heading for danger... but no spoilers from me!
I love the way Armstrong explores the side of Cold War politics that we seldom see in spy thrillers: the exploration of class and sex in the world of political change is particularly intriguing. But more than anything it is the way she approaches her subject as a whole. Yes, we have the violence associated with any story that focuses on a political system that is based on fear and oppression, but this happens in the wings in her books. Instead she chooses to show us the more insidious, velvet glove side of the business, rather than the blunt instrument to the head - the subtle manipulation of the vulnerable and disaffected, the gentle persuasion, the way temptation can be used to direct someone and sway them to your cause. This is glorious, intelligent writing about games within games, that keeps you interested in a way that pure violence never can.
There is so much to admire in this book, just as in the first Moscow Wolves novel. Much of this can be read as a standalone story, with characters cropping up from the first book, but you do really need to have read book one to understand quite what is playing out on the Moscow stage, and where the ending takes you. Everything is beautifully set up for the next novel, and I cannot wait to read it.
The Starlings of Bucharest is available to buy now from your favourite book retailer. You can also find my review of book one, The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt HERE.
Thank you to Sandstone for sending me a paperback copy of this book in return for an honest review and for inviting e to be part of this blog tour.
About the author:
Sarah Armstrong is the author of three novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt. She is also the author of A Summer of Spying, a short non fiction work about her experience of jury service during the Covid-19 pandemic, authority, truth, and the surveillance we are all exposed to.
She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing with the Open University.
Sarah lives in Colchester with her husband and four children.
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