Live Not By Lies
Patrick Coffey
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.
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Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9866069-6-5
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9866069-7-2
Advance acclaim for Live Not By Lies
“An engrossingly complex novel that breathes life into 20th-century Russian history and provocatively fills in unknown details by melding fiction and fact.”
-- Kirkus Reviews
"This absorbing and rigorous blend of history and fiction offers an expansive view of a turbulent time"
-- The US Review of Books (Recommended)
ACCLAIM FOR OTHER WORK BY AUTHOR PATRICK COFFEY:
“Alive with brilliance and infused with human frailties”
—Nancy Greenspan, author
“A joy to read”
—John Servos, Professor of History, Amherst College
“Superbly crafted”
—Dudley Herschbach, Nobel laureate, Chemistry
“A gripping page-turning narrative”
—Chemistry World
Author Patrick Coffey
Patrick Coffey spent most of his career in the design of instruments for chemical research, founding or co-founding a number of scientific instrument companies. In 2003, he began research into the history of chemistry as a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Live Not By Lies is the culmination of his long fascination with the Soviet Union.
Patrick 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 a “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.
