YOUNG PHILBY

One midnight in January in the early 1960s, the Russian freighter Domatova quietly slipped out of Beirut harbour. The ship had sailed with a single passenger on board: an Englishman named Harold Adrian Russell Philby, nicknamed Kim. He had fled the Lebanese capital with little more than the clothes on his back. The Englishman had used editions of James Hilton's "Lost Horizon" for enciphering purposes (page, line and letter number) when he communicated with his Soviet controllers. As the lights of Beirut vanished, he tried to imagine the life that awaited him in the Soviet Union. Would Moscow Centre welcome him as a senior Soviet intelligence officer? Would the Great Game the Englishman was so keen to play have a third act? For a spy, like a climber on a cliff, was there really no way out except up? With the same mastery and attention to detail he brought to "The Stalin Epigram", Robert Littell delivers a gripping novel about the most enigmatic spy of the last century.