Live Not by Lies is literary fiction embedded in Soviet history.

This is a story of two families at the center of Communism’s soul-wrecking lies — one family among the wreckers and one among the wrecked. The wreckers are characters from the history books. They include Zoya Zarubina, who translated the stolen American atomic bomb secrets, and her stepfather, Leonid Eitingon, who directed Trotsky’s murder in Mexico. The wrecked, the Anokhins, stand for the experiences of millions — the Gulag, starvation, exile, blackmail, and murder. Trotsky, Stalin, Beria, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Daniel Siqueiros, Isaac Babel, Andrei Sakharov, and Anna Akhmatova are all characters in this story.

Publication is slated for October of 2023. Advance review copies are available for download. If you don’t have the password and need one, please let us know.

About Patrick Coffey

Dr. Coffey is also the author of Cathedrals of Science (Oxford University Press, 2008), a nonfiction examination of the rivalries that shaped modern chemistry. Publishers Weekly called it “an engrossing, often somber history.” Chemistry World called it “A gripping page-turning narrative that elegantly combines popular science with a serious history of science.” That book was positively blurbed by two Nobel laureates.