An untold chapter of America's past, a fascinating insight into a centuries-old love story, Glorious Misadventures is an expansive history of Russian colonisation from Guardian Award-shortlisted author Owen Matthews

Heartbreaking, romantic and utterly compelling ... Here is an astonishing personal history of love, death and betrayal in Russia by a half-Russian writer who really knows the texture of the Motherland Simon Sebag Montefiore on Stalin's Children This wonderful memoir brings to life the human victims of a terrifyingly inhuman system Antony Beevor, Sunday Telegraph Books of the Year ***** Owen Matthews's search through the appalling bureaucratic nightmare all these decades later for what really happened to his grandfather is heroic ... Their struggle to be together is another relic of the Soviet age, less terrifying to read about but no less compulsive Independent on Sunday A superb chronicle of the 20th-century Soviet Union, seen through the eyes of his parents and grandparents: a Russian Wild Swans ... Some of the stories will stay with me forever Christopher Hart, Sunday Times