'Highly readable, deeply informed.' Sunday TimesFrom Stalin's Soviet Union to Putin's Russia, this sweeping family memoir reveals what life is like for ordinary people in extraordinary times.The Soviet Union, 1962. Shoemaker Stanislav Suvorov is imprisoned for five years. His crime Selling his car for a profit, contravening the Kremlins strict laws of speculation. Laws which, thirty years later, his daughter Zhanna helps to unravel. In the new Russia, yesterdays crime is todays opportunity.On his release from prison, social shame drives Stanislav to voluntary exile in Siberia, moving his family from a relatively comfortable, continental life in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to frigid, farthest-flung Krasnoyarsk. For some, it is the capital of the gulag. For others, it is the chance to start over again. These are the last days of a Soviet Union in which the Communist Party and KGB desperately cling to power, in which foreigners are unwelcome and travel abroad is restricted, where the queues for bread are daily and debilitating and where expressing views in favour of democracy and human rights can get you imprisoned or sent into exile. The Shoemaker and His Daughter takes in more than eighty years of Soviet and Russian history through the prism of one family a family author Conor OClery knows he is married to Zhanna.