In a country house in England a precocious teenage exile from revolutionary Russia sets down his adventures on paper, beginning with his first ball in St Petersburg and how he frees a huge African elephant from a cruel circus.
Pickering’s extraordinary wartime novel traces the violent exploits of Operation Lucy – centred on the mysterious ‘Hyman Kaplan’.
A young pianist, travelling in the Congo to meet a former mentor with whom he shares a dark past, falls in love with a Congolese army officer's wife