Christian Salmon

"This page-turning biographical novel follows the footsteps of a forgotten legend of the Russian Revolution. Yakov Blumkin claimed to have had nine lives. He was a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotsky's secretary. Executed in 1929 on the orders of Stalin at the age of twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire...