Ted moves to London to become a journalist but quickly slides into debt. Things look up when he is given the opportunity to go to Romania to interview a film director and then attend the Moscow film festival.

But someone has other plans for him.

Has he walked into a trap?

Brilliantly evocative of the insidiousness, paranoia and mistrust of the Soviet period. A thrilling read

We all start out from Graham Greeneland — the journey across it, even out of it, is what matters.

Sarah Armstrong cuts her own path … an enviable talent for location and detail. She may be new to spy-noir but I think the master himself would endorse The Starlings of Bucharest — an enthralling Greeneland tale of an innocent young man out of his depth in a cold, cold war.

The prose is beguiling – Alice Munro meets John le Carré.

‘A mesmerising, evocative novel in which characterisation and narrative tension are in perfect balance.’

Sarah Armstrong is the author of four novels, most recently The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt and The Starlings of Bucharest. 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.