Excerpts from Our American Comrade
I’m posting a PDF of four chapters from my novel in progress (mostly completed, ~900 pages). Click the above link to read the PDF.
This novel is the first in a series on revolutions. The story follows William Leonard, an American Communist Party member who is invited (ordered) to go into the secret wing of the Party co-opted by the Soviets for the international espionage operations (the ‘apparatus’). Leonard and his spy handler, Trofim Krivoshei, are bound up together in a world of smoke and mirrors where deception is the basic currency of life, and the slightest misstep means utter disaster.
Leonard is a devoted Communist, willing to give his life to his cause. But as he falls deeper into the dark world of Soviet espionage, he becomes increasingly convinced that the Party is irretrievably corrupted, and that its methods are fundamentally at odds with the values he holds dear. He and Krivoshei have to figure out how to extricate themselves from this existential predicament while saving their lives, and their souls, in the process. And it’s not clear that this is even possible.