Martin Sixsmith was born in Cheshire and educated at Oxford, Harvard, in Leningrad and at the Sorbonne. From 1980 to 1997 he worked for the BBC, as the Corporation’s correspondent in Moscow, Washington, Brussels, Geneva and Warsaw. From 1997 to 2002 he worked for the British government as director of communications. His previous factual books are Putin’s Oil: The Yukos Affair and the Struggle for Russia, The Litvinenko File and Moscow Coup: The Death of the Soviet System. His novels include The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, I Heard Lenin Laugh and Spin.