Martin Booth’s fictional history of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen arrested for spying in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s.
An internationally renowned writer and biographer, Martin Booth was also an accomplished novelist.
His novel The Industry of Souls was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize. His penultimate book was Cannabis: A History, and he died in February 2004 shortly after completing Gweilo.