For three generations of Matthews's family, Russia was a place that “made us and freed us and inspired us and very nearly broke us.” In this fascinating family memoir, Matthews, Newsweek' s Moscow bureau chief, recounts that history. His maternal grandfather was executed in Stalin's purges in 1937. His mother, separated from her own mother for 11 years, grew up essentially as an orphan. But even more extraordinary is the tale of Matthews's parents' relationship. His father, Mervyn Matthews, was a British embassy staffer in Moscow turned graduate student who left Russia after the KGB tried to recruit him in 1960. Returning in 1963, he fell in love with a Soviet woman, but when he again refused to do business with the KGB, he was thrown out of the country. For the next several years, he lobbied to reunite with the woman who would become Matthews's mother, finally getting her out of the USSR in 1969. Drawing on KGB files and his parents' hundreds of letters from their years of separation in the 1960s, Matthews (now married to a Russian woman) relates this dramatic tale in understated but lovely prose.