Immensely pleasurable reading... Intricate, charming and altogether surprising.”— The New York Times Book Review on THE WATCHMAKER OF FILIGREE STREET You were a child,’ Shenkov said, half over him. He was just on the other side of the door now. Valery touched it, wanting to open it, and not. ‘Anyway, human trials. Tell me how it would work here.’"

I always come out of a Natasha Pulley book feeling like my heart has grown several sizes to better accommodate all the emotions the book has summoned in me. She has such a magical way with words, and her full talents are on display here. This book is a real gem, and a worthy successor to Pulley’s absolute masterpiece The Kingdoms. I want to spend ten hours on Wikipedia reading about radiation, and I want to reread this book immediately so I can feel everything all over again.So Valery informs this little girl without either of her parent's consent that, "It’s not something we know how to cure. That means you will probably die of it," further informing her that she will die before she can grow up. your idea of normal treatment is to be arrested, abused, beaten, and imprisoned for things that aren’t your fault, and which are not crimes. That doesn’t happen in England. I know that sounds like some fantastical decadence to you, but it is not. Some promised lands really are milk and honey." HAHAHAHAHAHA absolutely deranged The provocative, unsettling latest by Pulley revolves around a horrifying and secretive research project deep in the countryside of the Soviet Union in 1963...Her dark humor, which turns on the blind faith given to Soviet authority figures despite their outlandish claims, combines with complex characters and a clear understanding of radiation science to yield an explosive blend. The chilling result feels all too plausible.

The year is 1963, and Dr. Valery Kolkhanov, a nuclear scientist, is moved from his frozen Siberian prison to City 40. There he’s expected to serve out the remainder of his prison term by studying radiation and its effect on the local wildlife. But instead of finding answers to his research questions, Valery discovers a very large amount of radiation in the area and is determined to uncover the source of it. He thought he’d controlled his voice well, but beyond the cubicle door, Shenkov stopped pacing, and there was a long silence.The novel opens in a prison camp, where our central character, the Valery K of the title, suddenly finds he's being transferred to who-knows-where. Is he being sent to a different camp? Is he simply going to be taken out into the woods and shot? Is he being set up for a second set of accusations and punishment? Is he about to be tortured to try to force out any information he didn't provide when originally arrested? Shenkov handed Valery a pamphlet. "There’s an ice rink in Newcastle." Language: English Words: 1,351 Chapters: 1/1 Comments: 10 Kudos: 56 Bookmarks: 2 Hits: 257

I do not believe at all in the happy ending for the village, or that the embassies would not have people watching them all the time and that they could put 70 people into the british embassy just like that, in Moscow in the 1960s. Or how they got them all out. Sorry, I do not believe that could have happened; Sverdlovsk was an ugly industrial city. Outside the airport, it was so warm that there was a misty rain glinting on the steps and the lamp posts and the bonnets of the taxis. There was no need for a coat, even. He was staring at the film of water moving under someone's windscreen wipers when the KGB lady hailed a taxi and put him in it. Somehow, Valery and the Shenkovs escape Chelyabinsk and wind up in the middle of nowhere, Kazakhstan. With Anna and Shenkov resuming their marriage, Valery will have to figure out where his place is in this relationship. Language: English Words: 2,157 Chapters: 1/1 Comments: 6 Kudos: 34 Bookmarks: 1 Hits: 160 The house isn’t bugged, but old habits, Valery supposes, are said to die hard. Language: English Words: 1,657 Chapters: 1/1 Comments: 16 Kudos: 76 Bookmarks: 7 Hits: 532another point that confused me was when valery spoke of the gulag to the students at the lab, and they were all in disbelief: This interesting novel, by Natasha Pulley, is set in Russia in 1963. The story begins in a Siberian gulag in winter where Valery, or zek (prisoner) 745 as he’s known, has spent six years of his ten-year sentence. Through his scientific knowledge, personality and ruthless actions, he has a relatively privileged position. He’s not in the mines anyway, which is a slow and painful death sentence. Valery is a biochemist and it turns out that his specialty of nuclear radiation research on animals is in demand in a secretive city. From the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Kingdoms, an epic Cold War novel set in a mysterious town in Soviet Russia with a slow burn romance at its hearts. Pulley's broad perspective distinguishes her work from that of more-routine thriller authors. Studded with memorable characters and deepened by its exploration of thorny moral issues, The Half Life of Valery K is gripping popular entertainment with a pleasing intellectual heft.

here, its kindness in a world so harrowing and bleak, safety in a place that isn’t, the choice of kindness when cruelty is easier, the arms around you when your lungs don’t work, the warm touch that tries to ease away embedded shards under skin. and as always, an inexplicable pull. Human radiation studies sound odd, but I guarantee that every nation in the world with nuclear capacity is conducting them in one form or other. Germany was running human studies in the thirties and I know because I worked on them.’ He had to screw his eyes shut. ‘I worked on them. If I were German, I’d have been condemned in the Nuremberg trials for what happened in those studies. I’d be in prison now for war crimes. It isn’t ridiculous.’

Pulley indicates in her afterword that much of what happens in the novel is based on true events, though Valery and his comrades are fictional. This aura of realism casts the story in a frightening light, particularly with the current war in Ukraine. To think of what could’ve happened years ago or of what might yet happen – it’s scary times we live in. I donot understand the POINT of this book. What was the point? We read about actual real life horrific things that have happened to actual real life people and we get that absolute deranged ending ??? I cant believe how absolutely insentive this book was while dealing with such an insensitive topic plus the very idea of pairing a Gulag prisoner & a KGB agent? and the Gulag prisoner working in his youth on literal human experiments run by nazis? pulley did handle it with as much grace as she could i guess, but uhh... that is a Choice! Under is-a-change, we can file the fact that this novel is set in the Soviet Union during the cold war. It's also, with some specific exceptions, based on real-world material. Her setting did exist, though she had to do some inventing to fill in the unknowns.