This is an historical novel about the final days of the Russian Royal family, imprisoned by the Bolsheviks shortly before their assassination. As they edge toward the hour of reckoning a last loyal regiment picks its way across Siberia to rescue them. Fluttering at the edge of the quietly disintegrating regiment and the doomed family are fragments of other worlds: hunters of the Taiga forest, the ghost of Rasputin, an ancient, self-confident peasant civilisation, harried Jews, enclosed Russian Orthodox nuns...


It should all be more interesting than it actually is, given its complex, thought-provoking themes: the willingness of men to embrace delusion in difficult times, the relationship of a disciplined organisation like the army to a culture of forest hunters... There’s a sentimental view of Tsarism here that could convince only the historically ignorant. But there are wonderful moments and images: the Tsarina’s sister, a lively woman trapped inside Imperial mummery, who ‘could lie so well to herself she forgot she was inventing half her life’; the lonely Tsarevich’s childish fantasy of a companion who ‘followed him with hesitant, troubled steps, as though unaware of him waiting for her ahead, as if not seeing him’; and the peasant soldiers far from their villages and too long in the Tsar’s army.

‘...they dreamt of returning to their isbas, to sleep above the stove, to lay in peat during the summer and cook and chat around the fire in winter, waiting for spring. The fields were waiting for them, so thick with wheat every summer that it was difficult to see how one pair of arms could reap all that gold from the earth blessed by God.’ p149