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Summary
Summary
Tom Rob Smith-the author whose debut, Child 44, has been called "brilliant" (Chicago Tribune), "remarkable" (Newsweek) and "sensational" (Entertainment Weekly)-returns with an intense, suspenseful new novel: a story where the sins of the past threaten to destroy the present, where families must overcome unimaginable obstacles to save their loved ones, and where hope for a better tomorrow is found in the most unlikely of circumstances . . .
THE SECRET SPEECH
Soviet Union, 1956. Stalin is dead, and a violent regime is beginning to fracture-leaving behind a society where the police are the criminals, and the criminals are innocent. A secret speech composed by Stalin's successor Khrushchev is distributed to the entire nation. Its message: Stalin was a tyrant. Its promise: The Soviet Union will change.
Facing his own personal turmoil, former state security officer Leo Demidov is also struggling to change. The two young girls he and his wife Raisa adopted have yet to forgive him for his part in the death of their parents. They are not alone. Now that the truth is out, Leo, Raisa, and their family are in grave danger from someone consumed by the dark legacy of Leo's past career. Someone transformed beyond recognition into the perfect model of vengeance.
From the streets of Moscow in the throes of political upheaval, to the Siberian gulags, and to the center of the Hungarian uprising in Budapest, THE SECRET SPEECH is a breathtaking, epic novel that confirms Tom Rob Smith as one of the most exciting new authors writing today.
Author Notes
Tom Rob Smith graduated fromCambridgeUniversityin 2001 and lives inLondon. His first novel, Child 44 , was a New York Times bestseller and an international publishing sensation. Among its many honors, Child 44 won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in 1956, bestseller Smith's edgy second thriller to feature Leo Demidov (after Child 44) depicts the paranoia and instability of the Soviet Union after the newly installed Khrushchev regime leaks a "secret speech" laying out Stalin's brutal abuses. Now working as a homicide detective, Leo has long since repudiated his days as an MGB officer, but his former colleagues, fearful of reprisals from their victims, have begun taking their own lives. Leo himself becomes the target of Fraera, the wife of a priest he imprisoned. Now the leader of a violent criminal gang, Fraera kidnaps Leo's daughter, Zoya, and threatens to kill Zoya if Leo doesn't liberate her husband from his gulag prison. Shifting from Moscow to Siberia and to a Hungary convulsed by revolution, this fast-paced novel is packed with too many incidents for Smith to dwell on any in great depth. Though its drama often lacks emotional resonance, this story paints a memorable portrait of post-Stalinist Russia at its dawn. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
From Smith (Child 44, 2008), an intense thriller set in the Soviet Union during the tumultuous days that followed the death of Stalin. When Khrushchev delivered a speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, admitting to the paranoid excesses of his predecessor Stalin's regime, he did much to loosen the bonds of fear that kept Soviet society in line. However, in this novel, the speech also triggers a wave of vicious reprisals against secret policemen who were responsible for some particularly brutal acts during Stalin's reign of terror. Among those in danger is Leo Demidov, the reformed security officer with a conscience who tracked down a serial killer in Child 44. In order to redeem his brutal past, Leo has leveraged the official attention he received from catching the child killer to create a specialized homicide unit, something that would have been unthinkable under Stalin. After investigating the death of a former prison guard and having a conversation with a terrified former colleague who also winds up dead, Leo begins to put the pieces together, eventually realizing that those targeted are connected to the case of a dissident priest, a case to which Leo himself was intimately connected. When the danger expands to include the patchwork family Leo has been trying desperately to hold together, he must confront the terrible mistakes of his past to save his adopted daughter. Smith's ability to summon the paranoia and tumult of the post-Stalin period in all its dingy glory is truly astounding, as is his detailed knowledge of both the Soviet-era bureaucracy and its underworld. His characters, from the relentless Leo, to the petty criminals who populate the underworld, to a lonely guard aboard a frozen prison ship, are perfectly formed. His depiction of dismal Soviet society feels uncannily real, and his taut plot barrels onward like a loaded prisoner train headed for the Gulag. Finally, Leo is a fantastic creation: relentless, decent and wonderfully complicated. A superb thriller, full of pitch-perfect atmosphere. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Smith's stunning debut, Child 44 (2008), was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize. Now he's back, and so is his long-suffering, soulful, courageous hero, Leo Demidov. It's 1956, and Leo, heartsick over his dutiful work as an MGB (State Security) agent, which requires him to send innocent people to the gulag, wants only to love and support his wife, Raisa, and their two adopted daughters, Zoya and Elena. But Nikita Khrushchev's speech to the twentieth Communist Party Congress, criticizing Stalin's brutality and mandating reform, frees many former prisoners and starts a wave of brutal reprisals against Soviet bureaucrats. Leo and his family are prime targets of a driven, devious, and dangerous female gang leader, whose goal in life is to make Leo suffer more than she did. Her machinations lead Leo through the freezing sewers of Moscow to the gulag and on to Budapest, just as Soviet tanks are leveling it. As in Child 44, Smith's plotting is elaborate, and his pacing is relentless. His characters are wonderfully drawn, and the near-nonstop action is utterly gripping. Again, as in the earlier book, however, the author's greatest success is in personalizing the stunning tragedy and brutality of life for many millions of Russians. The Secret Speech is a harrowing novel, but everyone who loved Child 44 will leap to read it.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A member of the Soviet secret police with blood on his hands seeks redemption as an era ends. TOM ROB SMITH'S second novel, "The Secret Speech," is set in 1956 as the Soviet Union takes its first baby steps toward de-Stalinization. Midway through the book, prisoners in a Siberian gulag riot and overthrow their captors. The camp commander, Sinyavsky, who has been driven mad by his sins, is ordered to climb 13 steps to what was once his office. At each step, any of the former prisoners can recite one of the commander's crimes. If he is found guilty, he mounts another step; should he reach the top, he will be executed. Racked by guilt though he may be, Sinyavsky deems absurd the entire notion of karmic justice in post-Stalinist Russia. He reminds his would-be executioners that while he is guilty of terrible crimes, in recent years he has often acted as their benefactor, helping their families financially, improving medical care and increasing food rations. He asks them: "If you can take a step up, can you not also take a step down? If you can do wrong can you not also do good? Can I not try and put right the wrongs that I have done?" To which the men reply, "No second chance." "The Secret Speech" considers the thorny question of second chances for people who may not have deserved a first. The title refers to a speech given by Nikita Khrushchev, ostensibly behind closed doors, in the shaky dawn of his regime. It's meant to usher in a new era of benevolence from a government previously defined by genocidal proclivities and purges. But two factions - the state-sponsored torturers and murderers on one side, and criminal gangs, known as the vory, on the other - have no interest in either delivering or receiving a mea culpa. For the criminals, it's far too little. For the representatives of the state, "it has nothing to do with whether or not Stalin went too far. He did. Of course he did. But we cannot change the past. And our authority is based on the past." Once the secret speech is leaked to the public, the vory begin a campaign of reprisal against the policemen, jailers, judges and clergymen who helped Stalin maintain his rule. One of those swept up in the blood orgy is a former officer of the secret police, Leo Demidov, the tortured hero of Smith's previous novel, "Child 44." Leo, during his three years with the secret police, sent hundreds to torture chambers, the gulags or the executioner. Not surprisingly, he is beset by galactic levels of guilt. He and his wife, Raisa, live in Moscow with their adopted daughters, Zoya and Elena. The girls were orphaned when men under Leo's command executed their parents. Elena, the younger of the two, seems willing to accept the attempt at domestic bliss, but Zoya often stands over Leo's bed with a butcher knife in hand, wishing she could slash his throat. Zoya isn't the only vengeful representative of Leo's past. Her adult doppelgänger can be found in Fraera, an improbable vory leader. Betrayed and imprisoned by Leo seven years before, Fraera has returned to exact her revenge not only on Leo and his family but also on the brutal apparatus that sent her and her husband to the gulag. "I was nothing until I hated you," Fraera tells Leo. She personifies justice denied until the soul turns to hickory, but she feels more like an idea than a character. Her diabolical plan for a day of reckoning drives the narrative engine but is the weakest part of an otherwise remarkable novel. YET, outlandish as her plan may be, it does keep us reading. Soon Leo, to protect his troubled family, must infiltrate the gulag where he sent so many for crimes of dubious merit. Once in the gulag, not only must he survive - no small thing for a policeman - but he must also gain the trust of a man he imprisoned so he can help that man escape. At every step of his journey, he's confronted with the callous injustice he was party to during his days with the secret police. ("This was where they died: the men and women he'd arrested, the men and women whose names he'd forgotten.") As his trek leads him beyond the gulags and back to Moscow and then on to Budapest during the Hungarian uprising, he becomes inextricable from the novel's central questions - is redemption possible for men like him? And if so, should it be? Meanwhile, Zoya, the adopted daughter who despises Leo with evangelical relish, has become a budding revolutionary and a member of the vory, running through the Soviet night on illicit missions with her paramour, an illiterate adolescent assassin named Malysh. In Smith's hands these scenes attain a pulse of exhilaration worthy of Dickens by way of Conrad, and it is this relationship that propels the novel into its third act - a confluence of all sins and all comeuppance in the streets of Budapest. "Child 44" had an Acela of a plot going for it - a fictionalizing of the pursuit for Russia's greatest serial killer transposed to the Stalin era; mass murderers in pursuit of a mass murderer while under the aegis of arguably the most prodigious mass murderer in history. If this book never quite achieves the propulsive urgency of Smith's first novel, he more than makes up for it with a broadening of moral scope and thematic richness. Scenes like the ambush of two child assassins by aging Chekists; a white-knuckle plane ride across a lunar Siberian nightscape; a child straddling the decapitated head of a Stalin statue as it's pulled through the streets of Budapest; and a man trying to guide a truck across an ice-laden bridge on a frigid hillside, are rendered with passionate and indelible precision. But for all the excitement, we never lose sight of the mourning. In a country that lost between 10 million and 20 million lives during the three decades of Stalin's rule, melancholia and a bitter sense of the absurd become as much a staple as black bread and vodka. The guilt that pervades "The Secret Speech" is boundless - it moves from the global to the personal with stops everywhere between. Smith, like J. M. Coetzee in "Disgrace," asks whether "reparation" has lost its viability as either a word or a concept. Is it fair to ask your victims to absolve you of the crimes you perpetrated against them? Late in the novel we meet a man who has gotten away with an act of artistic theft on a national scale. He is revered as a genius for work he never created but instead stole from the dead, and he has begun to buckle under his guilt. Yet he asks of Leo, "What would you have me do?" In Smith's Soviet Union, that is the question. What is the ordinary man to do when his very existence makes him an apparatchik of institutionalized sadism? What is the individual's share of collective guilt? Most of the characters in "The Secret Speech" would answer that all are guilty, so none deserve saving. It's a testament to the novel's potency that you agree, yet hope for salvation anyway. Dennis Lehane's most recent novel is "The Given Day." During Stalin's rule, a bitter sense of the absurd became as much a staple as black bread and vodka.
Library Journal Review
The main characters introduced in Smith's debut, Child 44, continue their ferocious saga to find love and consolation against a backdrop of the totalitarian Soviet state. In 1956, copies of Khrushchev's anti-Stalin speech are delivered to officials responsible for the purges and repressions, thus releasing a new round of murders and suicides. At the same time, a second plot twines with the first as ex-lovers from Child 44 grapple in a macabre contest of vengeance and hate. Smith has proven his brutal touch when describing human conflict. With this thriller, he offers a fierce account of fighting onboard a storm-wracked prison ship on the Sea of Okhotsk-a hair-raising scene, alone worth the cost of the book. For all popular collections; be ready for short-term demand owing to heavy promotion. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.