The longest pleasure

the long version

A story of the cold war of the 1950s. It started as the Russians fought their way into the centre of Budapest in January 1945. Five people are thrown together in a nightmare which is to pursue them for the rest of their lives: the girls, one who knew only hate, and the other who had to live; the intelligence officers, the Russian and the Englishman, who planned their postwar worlds with ruthless single mindedness; and the boy, Alexander Galitsin, born of a Scottish mother and a Ukranian father, from his earliest yought caught astride the coming gulf that would divide the world.