Our Woman in Moscow

April 12, 2021
Williams (Her Last Flight) captivates with the story of an American woman’s effort to reunite with her twin sister after her defection to the Soviet Union. In 1952, Ruth Macallister, a secretary in New York City and de facto manager of a modeling agency, receives a visit from FBI agent Sumner Fox with questions about her twin sister, Iris, whom she has not seen for 12 years. Sumner tells Ruth her sister defected to Russia in 1948 with her husband, Sasha Digby, a former diplomat who worked with the twins’ brother at the U.S. embassy in Rome in 1940. Now that the KGB suspects Sasha of working as a double agent, the Digbys’ lives are in danger. Sumner devises a plan to have Ruth travel to Moscow to help Iris during her pregnancy, and he will accompany her undercover as her spouse. Ruth and Sumner’s efforts to extract the Digbys from the Soviet Union, however, are complicated by the KGB. Williams sharply observes the inequities women faced at the end of WWII and the simmering suspense of the Cold War. Historical fiction fans will be riveted by the complex family relationships and the intriguing portrayal of espionage. Agent: Alexandra Machinist, ICM Partners.

Starred review from May 1, 2021

In 1948, when Iris Digby disappears from her London home with her diplomat husband and two children, rumors abound: were they eliminated by Soviet intelligence, or did they defect? Four years later, after receiving a postcard from Iris, twin sister Ruth Macallister poses as the wife of a counterintelligence agent to travel to Moscow and whisk the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

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February 15, 2021
Twin sisters find themselves caught up in a Russian spy ring at the height of the Cold War. In 1952, Ruth Macallister, a former fashion model and the power behind the throne at a Manhattan modeling agency, receives a postcard from her twin sister, Iris Digby--sent from Moscow. When FBI man and former Yale fullback Sumner Fox comes sniffing around, Ruth at first withholds this information, but later the two will team up, pretending to be newlyweds, to go to Moscow with the intent of extracting Iris from the clutches of the Stalin regime. Or at least that's Ruth's intent--Sumner's mixed motives are a source of more confusion than intrigue. The 1952 sections, narrated by Ruth, alternate with Iris' story, set in 1948 Great Britain, detailing how her marriage is foundering. She always knew her husband, Sasha Digby, was a spy for the Russians, a mole embedded in the U.S. diplomatic corps. Lately, however, his drunkenness appears to have rendered him all but useless to his handlers. Iris met Sasha during the sisters' prewar Roman holiday in 1940 and, infatuated, married him in haste. Sasha's frequent all-night benders have definitely debloomed the rose. The 1948 narrative slows down the present action without really adding much crucial insight into how, or why, Sasha and Iris end up defecting, with their children, to Moscow or even why, after his poor performance, Moscow would want him. Making occasional appearances in the 1952 timeline is Lyudmila Ivanova, a tough-as-nails KGB operative and a single mother due to her informing on her husband, who was sent to the gulag. He's not the only family member she's turned in. Lyudmila has been assigned to monitor expat defectors like Sasha. Iris is the most fully developed and sympathetic character here. Ruth is another iteration of the wisecracking dame who has appeared in so many Williams novels, and Lyudmila seems patterned after Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, except that this doctrinaire minion of Stalin wouldn't be caught dead in a rom-com. A cumbersome plot weighs down this would-be spy thriller.

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May 1, 2021
Williams (Her Last Flight, 2020) again blends historical fiction and romance in this engaging tale of Cold War espionage. In 1952, Ruth Macallister is running a successful modeling agency in New York. Her twin sister, Iris, is apparently in Moscow, having accompanied her husband, Sasha Digby, an American diplomat, when he defected to the Soviet Union in 1948. The sisters parted on bad terms in 1940, when Ruth left Rome, where the two were living as WWII raged around them, and Iris stayed on with Sasha, eventually moving to London. Now, after years of silence, Ruth receives a postcard from Iris, who pleads with her to come to Moscow. A visit from a CIA counterintelligence agent, Sumner Fox, convinces Ruth to go the USSR, posing as Sumner's wife, to help the Digbys escape to America. The setup reeks of melodrama, but Williams, effectively juggling the narrative between the points of view of Ruth, Iris, and a Russian KGB agent, moves back and forth in time to build all the principals into full-bodied characters while delivering detail-rich portraits of wartime Italy, glittery fifties Manhattan, and grayed-out Moscow.

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