Fear of Mirrors: A Fall-of-Communism Novel

By Tariq Ali

The story of a family whose life mirrors the rise and fall of the Soviet Union

With the fall of Communism, East German dissident Vlady Meyer’s life begins to fall apart. As the German nation unifies, his wife splits up with him. He loses his university job now that the times have turned against his Marxist views. He wants to tell his alienated son, Karl, what his family’s long and passionate involvement with communism really meant, but he can’t. Vlady’s story is interwoven with that of Ludwik, Kim Philby’s recruiter, and his four comrades, brilliant Galician secret agents working for the Fourth Department of the Red Army.

Thoughtful and intimate, Fear of Mirrors unfolds an expansive plot that touches on the greatest political upheavals of the twentieth century. Its protagonist captures the hopes once roused by the Bolshevik Revolution and the hard realities that followed; Vlady Meyer is a mirror reflecting impeccably the intellectual milieu of an incomparable period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784786946

Tariq Ali

Writer, journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore and was educated at Oxford University, where he was president of the Oxford Union (a position subsequently occupied by Benazir Bhutto). He was a prominent leader of opposition to the war in Vietnam. Today he writes regularly for a range of publications including The Guardian, The Nation and The London Review of Books and is on the editorial board of New Left Review.  He has written more than a dozen books including non-fiction such as Can Pakistan Survive? The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Bush in Babylon and Pirates of the Caribbean, and fiction including Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, The Stone Woman and A Sultan in Palermo, as well scripts for both stage and screen. He lives in London.