Child 44 Man Booker Longlist 2008

Description

This novel is an amazingly assured and exciting debut, set in Soviet Russia in 1953, with a wonderfully realised sense of all-pervading fear and the desperateness of a chilling race against time.How do you solve an impossible crime? MGB Officer Leo is a man who never questions the Party Line. He arrests whomever he is told to arrest. He dismisses the horrific death of a young boy because he is told to, because he believes the Party stance that there can be no murder in Communist Russia. Leo is the perfect soldier of the regime. But suddenly his confidence that everything he does serves a great good is shaken. He is forced to watch a man he knows to be innocent be brutally tortured. And then he is told to arrest his own wife. Leo understands how the State works: Trust and check, but check particularly on those we trust. He faces a stark choice: his wife or his life. And still the killings of children continue...

Awards

Winner of CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2008 and Galaxy British Book Awards: Waterstone's New Writer of the Year 2009. Shortlisted for Desmond Elliott Prize 2008 and CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger 2008 and Costa First Novel Award 2008 and The South Bank Show Awards: Literature 2009 and Galaxy British Book Awards: Books Direct Crime Thriller of the Year 2009 and Independent Booksellers' Book of the Year Award: Adults' Book of the Year 2009.

Reviews

"'An amazing debut - rich, different, fully-formed, mature... and thrilling' Lee Child 'Child 44 is a remarkable debut novel - inventive, edgy and relentlessly gripping from the first page to the last' Scott Turow"

Author description

Tom Rob Smith was born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and an English father and was brought up in London where he still lives. He graduated from Cambridge in 2001 and spent a year in Italy on a creative writing scholarship. Tom has worked as a screenwriter for the past five years, including a six-month stint in Phnom Penh storylining Cambodia's first ever soap. CHILD 44 is his first novel.