This book tells the extraordinary story of a life spent in extraordinary circumstances. The author was born in Moscow and grew up in a Russia still adjusting to the post-Stalin era. An eventful enough life spent in the stability and certainty of Cold War communism was thrown into turmoil when the great Soviet experiment drew to an end during the late 1980's. In the chaos that replaced it the author, together with her small daughter, left the land of their birth and headed for England, on the other side of the recently withdrawn Iron Curtain. And so began the second phase of the author's life...