Philip Roth meets Evelyn Waugh in a blackly comic portrayal of prep-school adolescence. Motefiore creates a young anti-hero as hilarious as Just William, as monstrous as Stalin himself, whose rite of passage shows what happens when a game of power grows into a dangerous obsession.
No need for a summary of content here - an earlier review is excellent on this. The aspect of My Affair with Stalin I want especially to praise is its wonderful evocation of the life of a prep-school boy in the 1970s: I was there, and thanks to Montefiore, I've just been back.
Funny, sad, horrific, wonderful! A brilliant book; read it!