Red Sky at Noon

Summer 1942. Benya Golden, imprisoned in the Gulag for a crime he did not commit, is released into a Soviet penal formation fighting the German invasion. He joins a cavalry unit of Cossacks and convicts sent across the grasslands of southern Russia, where the possibility of redemption is inseparable from missions designed to expend the lives of men the state considers disposable.

The novel alternates between Benya’s war on the Eastern Front and the political world around Stalin in Moscow, while a relationship with an Italian nurse gives the battlefield story an intimate centre. Montefiore draws on the documented brutality of the German-Soviet war, Soviet penal service and Stalinist command culture, but Benya and his immediate comrades are fictional. The book is the second volume of the Moscow Trilogy.