All That It Ever Meant

The Man From St Petersburg is a dark tale of family secrets and political consequences. Ken Follett’s masterful storytelling brings to life the danger of a world on the brink of war.

A Secret Negotiation
1914. Tensions are rising as Europe finds itself caught in a web of alliances and dangerous warmongering. To help tip the balance in their favour Britain aims to draw Russia into an alliance with them instead of Germany. Czar Nicholas’s nephew, Prince Aleksei, is sent to London for secret naval talks with Lord Walden.

A Play for Power
Walden has a personal connection to Aleksei; his wife Lydia, is Aleksei’s aunt. But they are not the only ones interested in his arrival, including Walden’s daughter Charlotte, wilful, idealistic and with an awakening social conscience, Basil Thompson, head of Special Branch, and Felix Kschessinky, a ruthless Russian anarchist.

A World at War
With the British desperately needing a signed treaty and the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the destinies of these characters become inextricably linked as the final private tragedy which threatens to shatter the Waldens’ complacency is acted out.

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.

Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother’s sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she’d never return.

With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.