The Traitor's Daughter

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLERA Globe and Mail Best Book of the YearFinalist for the Rakuten Kobo emerging Writer Prize for Non-Fiction“A captivating memoir… . Spicer unravels her tale at a tantalizing pace, building a kaleidoscopic portrait of her enigmatic mother… . Both a wrenching depiction of a woman determined to bury her past and an eye-opening exploration of the fate of WWII’s Soviet POWs.”—Publishers Weekly“In exquisite prose, Spicer dismantles the “personal iron curtain” her Russian mother erected to escape her painful past. Rarely has there been a more powerful account of the 20th century’s horrors, from German slave labor camps to Russian Gulags, filtered so movingly through Spicer’s search for her mother’s story. Both mother and daughter surface from these pages as women of extraordinary courage. This book will make you weep.” —Rosemary Sullivan, author of Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva “In this searing exposé of her elusive mother’s past life, Roxana Spicer captures the traumas of war and the deep wounds that it can leave on a psyche. Spicer also illustrates the challenges that face a rigorous researcher – the dead-ends, the missing records, the tension between a hard-nosed filmmaker’s questions and a perplexed daughter’s sensitivities. The Traitor’s Daughter is both a compelling story and an important exploration of how one young Russian woman survived the maelstrom of World War Two and its aftermath.”—Charlotte Gray is the author of twelve non-fiction bestsellers, including Passionate Mothers, Powerful Sons: The Lives of Jennie Jerome Churchill and Sara Delano Roosevelt“A searing and irresistible dive into the chasm of family memory. Roxana Spicer’s story, and that of her mysterious mother, is one of the most compelling — and shattering — accounts I have ever read of World War Two jeopardy, and ultimate survival. The detective work is peerless, the emotional payload, overwhelming. You don’t just read this book, it swallows you whole.”—Martin Davidson, author of The Perfect Nazi: Discovering My Grandfather’s Secret Past and How Hitler Seduced a Generation“This rollercoaster of a narrative … ably interrogates memory and fact to highlight the difficulty of arriving at truth in history.” —Kirkus Reviews

Roxana Spicer grew up in Netherhill, Saskatchewan, population 80. As a documentary filmmaker and former CBC investigative journalist, her award-winning work across Canada led to real change. She has pursued stories in remotest Ecuador, the Arabian Desert, and the North Sea; she has reported from a high-tech ocean dive ship, a nomadic Kyrgyz yurt, and made multiple trips to Russia during the “wild west” years following the fall of the Soviet Union. The most elusive interview subject over her forty-year career remained her own mother. Roxana lives in Toronto.

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