Black Sun

A stunning debut thriller … ferocious, authentic and utterly terrifying … absolutely riveting. – Geoffrey Wansell * DAILY MAIL *There are some authors who have gone out into the world to observe the good, the bad and the ugly. Owen Matthews is such a novelist. Black Sun is fascinating and has fearsome authenticity. – FREDERICK FORSYTHAn outstanding first novel … Matthews writes superbly. * SUNDAY TIMES ‘Crime Book of the Month’ *One of the best thrillers of recent years … a glorious book, a tour-de-force. It drips with authenticity from every page … a page-turning, thumping good read. – DAVID YOUNG, bestselling author of Stasi ChildFact and fiction combine to keep the pages turning in this impressive debut thriller. – Antonia Senior * THE TIMES ‘Best Historical Fiction of the Year’ *A stunning debut. Matthews writes enviably well and knows Soviet Russia inside-out. Fantastic. – CHARLES CUMMINGEnthralling … Black Sun propels Matthews straight into the first division of thriller writers. – Adam LeBor * FINANCIAL TIMES *This thrilling and suspenseful and original thriller of murder and power is a compelling voyage into the darkest secret city of the soviet nuclear project by an expert on all of Russian life. – SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIOREThe most exciting thriller or mystery story debut this year … a cold war whodunnit … an absolutely gripping novel by one who knows Russia well and evokes a horrifyingly convincing Soviet Union. – A. N. Wilson * THE TABLET ‘Books of the Year’ *Brilliantly plotted and all the more satisfying because it is based on a true story … Something else, too: you get it that the Soviet Union in the sixties was a mess with all the wrong people holding the levers of power. And yet, inside the machine, there were humans too: sometimes noble, often seriously brilliant. Reading Black Sun is like stepping into a time machine and setting the dial for Soviet Russia, 1961. – JOHN SWEENEY

Owen Matthews is the author of two highly praised works of non-fiction, Stalin’s Children and An Impeccable Spy, and two acclaimed historical thrillers, Black Sun and Red Traitor. As a war correspondent, he covered conflicts in Bosnia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq and Ukraine, and for ten years he was Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief. He divides his time between Rome and Moscow.