Contemporary
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Will Kate risk everything for love and a good cause?
It’s Moscow, 1990. Gorbachev is initiating dramatic change in Russia. On a literary tour, London-based Kate Chisholm meets the young and passionate investigative journalist Valentin Kotov.
Over the next thirteen years, her love for him and her belief in his cause will put her own life and that of her surviving son Tom at risk and threaten to derail her ambitions to create a charity in memory of her dead son.
Set against the political and cultural turmoil of the break-up of the Soviet Union, this is a story of love and betrayal, of one man’s determination to expose corruption and the impact of his actions on Kate and all those around him.
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Set against a background of Russian politics in the last decade of the twentieth century, this story of love and loyalty on so many levels, takes us right to the heart of a world most of us know only through western press. We empathise with Kate’s love for Valentin, and though we want to tell her to be careful, we know she won’t and we can understand why. We sympathise with Anna as she struggles to bring up her niece without compromising the child’s loyalty to a father who isn’t worthy of it. He’s the perfect anti-hero - passionate, driven. Helen weaves her knowledge of Russian politics and culture through the story with great diplomacy. I found myself learning things I hadn’t realised I wanted to know. Absolutely love this - a complex love story skilfully handled. Will be the perfect book-group choice!
They say that to understand the days we live in now, we need to understand what came before. In ‘No Lemons in Moscow’ Helen Whitten gifts us one such insight into a period of Russia’s turbulent history and how belief in a cause can both unite and separate families, lovers, friends. But what the novel also tells us is not only that ‘No one in Russia has a simple life’, but that also it is beholden upon everyone to do what Harry tells Kate towards the end and that is that we need ‘to stop and listen to the stories we tell ourselves and to check them out.’ Not everything we tell ourselves is true and sometimes it takes a lifetime to discover this. It is because of these things that I believe ‘No Lemons in Moscow’ is required reading: a novel from the heart and of the heart.
