I have to be honest. I doubted my rating because the last part of the book suddenly made my brows knit together. But I loved the overall story so much and I’m in awe with the writing, and therefore just pushed the glorious five-star button! However, it felt like the writing was just a band aid for the larger issues this book had, both in plotting and in subject matter Excellent Soviet-era historical fiction with a very compelling main character, this was a great read albeit quite depressing (especially in hindsight as Pulley makes it clear in the afterword that this is very heavily based in reality). Readers from Eastern Europe are going to feel weird af about this. Or at least I know I did. The writing is excellent, there's a wide variety of complex characters, it feels like the science was well-researched, but is it really appropriate to have a romance between a former gulag prisoner and a KGB boss? But even ignoring that, the gender stuff and the misogyny was cringy.

I really loved Valery as a protagonist and thought Pulley did a great job of creating a character with a troubled past trying to work through his own issues while also working through a rather large main plot. I was also a big fan of Shenkov and enjoyed watching the relationship between the two characters change and grow. There's also a great cast of side characters throughout the book. There's some fantastic characterization for Valery and Shenkov. Pulley is world class here as always. There were passages I had to reread multiple times from sheer writerly envy and awe that with six sentences, Pulley manages to strip apart the entire psyche of a character. I think a good way to gauge people in real life is to examine how they make you feel when you're in their presence, and then how you feel once you leave it. The same goes for character relationships. We know exactly how Valery feels with and without Shenkov, and it goes beyond the basic "protagonist pines for a hot person." It's a tangle of distrust, contradictions, warmth, and ultimately, selfishness. She hones in magnificently on the core of their behaviours, and some of the resulting scenes took my breath away. The book is a mystery with three main players: Kolkhanov’s former teacher, who has summoned him here and tasked him with studying the effects of radiation on animals, an unusually principled KGB officer with whom Valery develops a friendship, and Valery himself.i wanted to like this book, i wanted to like valery - and i did, until it was revealed he took part in human experiments on jewish people and homosexuals in nazi germany, with the literal, actual josef mengele. god i wish i was kidding. i cannot tell you how unprepared and blindsided i was encountering the smiling and polite character of dr. mengele in a (among other things, romance!!!!!) book that i knew handled heavy subjects, but maybe not *quite* like this. There are two main female characters in the book. Resovkaya, Valery's old advisor and the head researcher of the facility within City 40 named the Lighthouse. And Anna, a genius nuclear physicist who is married to Shenkov and has four adorable children with him.

It’s one of those awkward ones where I did still like the book, but it has parts which I disliked on a spectrum ranging from slightly to intensely. And I never thought this would be something I’d say about a Natasha Pulley book, but here we are. listen, i love a messed up character. i love when characters make messed up choices, hard choices. i like villains. i loved missouri kite from the kingdoms, and he did (spoiler) throw a child overboard a ship to keep him quiet at one point. I just cant like or sympathise OR feel sorry or ANYTHING for a character who took part in it I am sorry , no matter how sorry he feels for it or how much the author tries to pass it as naievity . I've seen it before and once again I'm sitting here disappointed by the trajectory that both characters take. They're both headstrong women, brilliant in their field of work, and I had high hopes from how they were set up. Resovkaya is an older woman and enters the story with glittering red heels, lighthearted sass and a sway to her hips. She seemed to be a complex character with interesting sets of morals. Anna is pragmatic and easy-going and refuses to take no for an answer.What I noticed, though – Pulley couldn’t keep her Britishness out of her writing. Not all the characters read Russian to me, especially Valery, and I found it distracting because I had to remind myself over and over that he was Russian. It may be that the vernacular is a little off; perhaps too many Britishisms are in the dialogue. Whatever the reason, Valery and a few of the others needed something to root them into the setting. One boy was annoyed. ‘If you were truly loyal to the Party, you’d have been shot before you worked for the enemy though, wouldn’t you.’ Another historical novel written with panache is Rebecca Stott's Dark Earth (4th Estate), the gripping tale of two women who flee to Londinium in 500 AD. It is a novel that puts a female perspective right at the centre of a time period usually dominated by men's stories. I also enjoyed Natasha Pulley's The Half Life of Valery K (Bloomsbury), an engrossing novel set in Siberia in 1963. The story was inspired by some chilling real events after the cover-up of a radiation leak.”— Independent So... all in all... I felt a bit let down here... but it wasn't BAD. I never felt annoyed enough to just give up on the book and DNF it. It was easily readable and I did like the premise... But I did expect a bit more from it than I got, so we'll go middle of the road 3 stars. Every third person in the gulag is an academic,’ he said, slowly, because it was bizarre to stumble across someone who didn’t know that. He had thought the whole world knew. It had all come out after Stalin died, which was why Valery had almost laughed when he found himself being arrested a good three years after that. You could have papier-mâchéd Siberia with the reams of newsprint written about the arrests and the trials, but under no cover but a penitent air, the Kremlin had kept it going all the same. ‘People aren’t sent because of what they’ve done, they’re sent because of what they might do under the right conditions.’

The Half Life of Valery K, but from Shenkov's point of view. Language: English Words: 27,205 Chapters: 1/1 Comments: 22 Kudos: 63 Bookmarks: 18 Hits: 532 Based on actual events and information, we follow Valery from the prison camp where he was committed to a secret town where he's to work with others studying the effects of radiation on plants and animals. As the story proceeds, he becomes suspicious of what he's been told, suspecting more nefarious purposes at worst, and clueless carelessness at best, as he sees signs of much worse contamination than reported.I keep hearing all this about radiation, but frankly, comrade, if I can't see it and it doesn't bite, I'm not that worried."