- Home
- Non-Fiction
- True Crime
- A Very Expensive Poison
A Very Expensive Poison
The shocking true story of the Litvinenko poisoning, told by the author of The Snowden Files and Wikileaks.
7 in stock
Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order.
1st November 2006: Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. Twenty-two days later he dies, killed from the inside by Polonium – a rare, lethal and highly radioactive substance. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia.
This is the inside story of the life and death of Litvinenko and of Russia’s new cold war with the west. Harding traces the journey of the nuclear poison across London, from hotel room to nightclub, assassin to victim. It’s a deadly trail that leads back to Vladimir Putin, and to a regime exposed by the Panama Papers.
Luke Harding’s investigation into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, A Very Expensive Poison, may also help us shed light on the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury. From the author of the No.1 New York Times bestseller Collusion.
An expert chronicle of a sensational but opaque crime, and of the terrifying lawlessness it epitomised. Enthralling.
This extraordinarily pacy book - I downed it in two sessions - by the Guardian's former Moscow correspondent is one of the best political thrillers I have come across in years. It is also a wonderful guide to criminality and power in today's Russia - Boris Godunov pals up with the Cosa Nostra, as it were.
Harding, a former Moscow correspondent for The Guardian, tells this ghastly tale with real authority, wit and panache ... The book is as "definitive" as it claims, though "national security" means that the MI6 aspect of the story will never emerge. It is not only Russia that needs a change.
Gripping ... Harding doesn't overcook the metaphor, but Mayfair and all it represents is portrayed here as something potentially, maybe inherently toxic. When does a soft power aimed at attracting investment start to undermine real power?
Pacy and impassioned ... Harding paints deft portraits of the tragi-comic duo suspected of carrying out the crime.
A Very Expensive Poison reads like a John Le Carré spy novel, but shockingly it's all true. Luke Harding has followed the criminality of the Putin regime from Russia to the West and his story leaves us with terrible feeling of dread about what Putin will do next.
Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war and…
Read MoreBrowse a selection of books we think you might also like, with genre matches and a few wildcards thrown in.
Luke Harding, Guardian correspondent and author of Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, shares eight books to …
Invasion is the first book of reportage from the frontline of the Ukraine war, from the award-winning Guardian journalist and …
Invasion: Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival will be published on 24th November.
As the horrific invasion of Ukraine unfolds, we share stories, poems and links from Faber poets and authors connected to …