Summary and Reviews of Archangel by Robert Harris

Archangel by Robert Harris

Archangel

by Robert Harris
  • Critics' Consensus (7):
  • Readers' Rating (6):
  • First Published:
  • Dec 1, 1998, 373 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jan 2000, 415 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Archangel combines the imaginative sweep and dark suspense of Fatherland with the meticulous historical detail of Enigma. The result is Robert Harris's most compelling novel yet.

Present-day Russia is the setting for this stunning new novel from Robert Harris, author of the bestsellers Fatherland and Enigma.

Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives.

One night, Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook.

Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story. But what starts as an idle inquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across nighttime Moscow and up to northern Russia--to the vast forests near the White Sea port of Archangel, where the final secret of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century.

Archangel combines the imaginative sweep and dark suspense of Fatherland with the meticulous historical detail of Enigma. The result is Robert Harris's most compelling novel yet.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

National Review
...an exceptionally well written, skillfully crafted, continuously gripping thriller.

The New York Times
Powerful, clever...delivers the thrills of Graham Greene. Will keep you on edge until its bizarre conclusion.

The New York Times - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
After finishing Archangel, when you think about what happens, you find it so outlandish as to defy credibility. But Harris makes you believe it as it's happening. What he does particularly well is evoke the atmosphere of contemporary Russia, not only the physical sense of it but also its threat of violent instability, the howling of its caged wolves.

The Economist
Well-researched and skillfully observed, Archangel examines how Russia's uncompleted history--the "past that carries razors and pair of handcuffs"--continues to affect its attempt at free-market democracy. Underlying the story is the whispered issue of what makes Russia Russian.

Booklist - Gilbert Taylor
Building on his accurate historical sense, Harris inveigles readers with intricate plotting and concrete descriptions of Russia's contemporary "look," rewarding them with a thoroughly thrilling tale.

Library Journal
Among the many benefits of Russian glasnost has been the evolution of espionage fiction into a more cerebral form of international thriller. Archangel is a worthy example of how the history of modern Russia can be woven into a mesmerizing adventure yarn.

Publishers Weekly
Sex, violence and violent sex all play a part in Harris's entertaining, well-constructed, intelligently lurid tale, which, along with his first two novels, places him squarely in the footsteps not of "Conrad, Green and le Carre," as the publisher would have it, but of Frederick Forsyth. And, like Forsyth, Harris has yet to write a novel without bestseller stamped on it - including this one.

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Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

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