The Second Child

Knox at his most ambitious, scathing, hilarious best. CHARLOTTE WOOD

You can't choose your family, but you can choose your enemies.

1945: It's the dying days of the war. A triumphant Josef Stalin has the world's future in his hands, but leading up to the Potsdam peace conference he is restless and paranoid, increasingly suspicious that his ambitious security overlord Lavrentiy Beria is plotting against him.

Beria has a secret weapon, his best friend's daughter. A patriot and devotee of Papa Stalin, Melor Murtova has returned from a two-year exile to become Beria's adopted daughter, and his eyes and ears among the nepo babies of the Kremlin.

In this palace of intrigue and deception, Melor must play a dangerous game, outwitting treacherous power plays and the capricious whims of her frenemies, while conducting a secret mission of her own: to find out who murdered her parents before her time runs out.

Against a backdrop of international politics, spying and the true-history intrigue of the closing days of World War Two, The Second Child is a chilling black comedy about survival in the court of madmen.

The Second Child is fast-paced, resolutely playful and resolutely serious. That Knox can create such sparkling black comedy from one of the most morally compromised moments of the tragic twentieth century speaks volumes of his terrific talents and instincts as a writer. CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS

The Second Child takes us on a forensically researched, rollicking, deeply sinister and, yes, side-splitting journey through the treachery, paranoia, madness and shameless nepotism of Stalin's post-war court. LOL-ing at authoritarianism never felt quite so good or timely. PAUL DALEY

Unsettling, intelligent, and exacting. Tender in its attention to the ways we love, and brutal in its portrayal of the damage we do to one another. It's as unsettling as it is intelligent—and impossible to put down until you get to the end. SHANKARI CHANDRAN

Frighteningly funny, darkly moving and riveting from the start. This is a story of their time, but also of ours. RICHARD GLOVER

Malcolm Knox follows the spectacular The First Friend with a thrilling sequel in The Second Child—a gripping, thoroughly contemporary satire of postwar Kremlin offspring and their sadistic strongman dads. Holding up a dark mirror to our own collapsing democracies, The Second Child glitters with intrigue and vicious wit. This is Knox at his most ambitious, scathing, hilarious best. CHARLOTTE WOOD