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Leningrad in 1952: a city recovering from war, where Anna, a nursery school teacher, and Andrei, a young hospital doctor, are forging a life together. Summers at the dacha, preparations for the hospital ball, work and the care of sixteen-year-old Kolya fill their minds. They try hard to avoid coming to the attention of the authorities, but even so their private happiness is precarious. Stalin is still in power, and the Ministry for State Security has new targets in its sights. When Andrei has to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, Volkov, he finds himself and his family caught in an impossible game of life and death – for in a land ruled by whispers and watchfulness, betrayal can come from those closest to you . . .

A gripping and deeply moving portrait of life in post-war Soviet Russia, The Betrayal brilliantly shows the epic struggle of ordinary people to survive in a time of violence and terror.

Praise for Counting the Stars:

'An assured, addictive and captivating tale of forbidden love. Dunmore possesses a gift for turning every genre she touches into gold' Daily Telegraph

'Powerful, memorable, compelling' Sunday Times

'A highly charged, richly evocative story of illicit passion . . . conjures up the corruption and rampant consumerism of ancient Rome' Daily Mail

Helen Dunmore has published eleven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphans; Counting the Stars and The Betrayal. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.