Edith Wharton with the death penalty

My latest novel is called One Night in Winter. It starts with the deaths of two schoolchildren in Moscow 1945 and expands into a secret police case, directed by Stalin himself, to find out what really happened to these children and their friends. It's set around the most elite school in Red Moscow. But the arrests of many children expose the hidden world of families and marriages unveiling forbidden love affairs and family secrets in a country when such mistakes can be punished by death. The schoolgirl Serafima, one of my heroines, describes this as 'Edith Wharton with the death penalty." Ultimately the book is about Love - family love, youthful romance, adulterous affairs. So though this is a historical novel, with Stalin as a character, and a thriller with a police investigation, it is really a story about Love. Many novels about love and marriage are set in Hampstead or Manhattan but the advantage of setting it in Stalin's inner circle in Moscow is that the risks, the stakes, the jeopardy is much higher: the prizes are the same but the costs can be death itself. I often write books about power - such as my books on 'Catherine the Great+Potemkin' or 'Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar' or even 'Jerusalem' but above all, I love to write about private lives, families, and their secrets. My last novel 'Sashenka' was about this too and was also set in Russia and I just loved writing this new novel.... In that book, the parents must save the children. In 'One Night in Winter', it is the children who can save or destroy their parents. Imagine if your children were arrested, what secrets would they reveal about you? Even though it has some real historical characters, my great pleasure was creating the leading characters, Satinov, Dashka, Serafima, Benya, I hope you enjoy them too. For me they became real, more real than anyone, as real as my own family..... Let me know what you think. yours Sebag