Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Betrayal
    Unavailable
    The Betrayal
    Unavailable
    The Betrayal
    Ebook450 pages7 hours

    The Betrayal

    By Helen Dunmore

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A “magnificent, brave, tender” novel of post-WWII Russia from the author of The Siege—shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (The Independent on Sunday).
     
    Leningrad 1952. Andrei, a young doctor, and Anna, a nursery school teacher, have forged a life together in the postwar, post-siege wreckage. But they know their happiness is precarious, like that of millions of Russians who must avoid the claws of Stalin’s merciless Ministry of State Security.
     
    When Andrei is forced to treat the sick child of a senior secret police officer, his every move is scrutinized, making it painfully clear that his own fate—and that of his family—is bound to the child’s. Trapped in an impossible game of life and death, Andrei and Anna must avoid the whispers and watchful eyes of those who will say and do anything to save themselves . . .
     
    With The Betrayal, internationally acclaimed author Helen Dunmore “vividly depicts the difficulty of living by principle in a tyrannical society, in which paranoia infects every act, and even ordinary citizens become instruments of terror” (The New Yorker).
     
    “An emotionally charged thriller, The Betrayal unfolds breathlessly and with great skill. . . . You don’t want to put it down. . . . Elegant yet devastating.” —The Seattle Times
     
    “With precise period detail and astute psychological insight, Dunmore brings the last months of Stalin’s reign to life and reminds us why some eras shouldn’t be forgotten.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 6, 2011
    ISBN9780802195012
    Unavailable
    The Betrayal
    Author

    Helen Dunmore

    HELEN DUNMORE is a novelist, short story writer and poet. She has written twenty-two children’s books, including Brother Brother, Sister Sister; The Lilac Tree; The Seal Cove; and the bestselling Ingo series. She has written nine adult books including A Spell of Winter, which won the 1996 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her poetry collections have won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the Signal Poetry Award. Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire, England, and now lives in Bristol with her husband and children.

    Read more from Helen Dunmore

    Related to The Betrayal

    Related ebooks

    Thrillers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      About Ed

      Jun 14, 2022

      I walk into the orchid show with Ed. As soon as I see the tumultuous hall I know he won’t last long. Ed walks like an old man though he is forty. After ten minutes on his feet, he vomits on some purple phalaenopsis. I get him outside through a fire e

      18 min read

    • Article

      Michael Rosen On His Covid Ordeal: ‘You Are A Different Person After Something Like That’

      May 27, 2021

      I’m looking at Michael Rosen through my computer screen and trying very hard not to cry. Not because he’s being a brute – Rosen would no doubt be a strong contender for World’s Nicest Man – but for the sheer fact that he’s here. He’s alive. Barely a

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Story In Notes

      Sep 25, 2023

      For five years, I have been collecting medical anecdotes. They exist in a file of short stories, anonymised, and with invented names. There are encounters in the chaos of the ED, in crowded wards during Covid, in eerily underpopulated private hospita

      2 min read

    • Article

      We Don't Talk About That Here

      Nov 4, 2021

      We Don't Talk About That Here
      4 min read

    • Article

      Chaos Theory

      Mar 1, 2021

      Chaos Theory
      12 min read

    • Article

      A Feeling Artist

      Dec 15, 2018

      Onstage, I’m thinking about the postman who was so overwhelmed by the amount of mail he had to deliver that he threw it all, and then himself, into the sea. I’m thinking about the agoraphobic grandmother who refused to go outside, even when the fire

      15 min read

    • Article

      Something More

      May 14, 2021

      Something More
      5 min read

    • Article

      Nicholas Weddell

      Nov 9, 2022

      Nicholas Weddell
      6 min read

    • Article

      And Joy Shall Overtake Us as a Flood

      Apr 10, 2023

      A few days after the accident, a nurse removes the bandages from my face and hands me a mirror. A troll stares back at me while the nurse says something about cosmetic surgery. When I don’t respond, he leaves me alone to stare at myself. My face ache

      27 min read

    • Article

      Have We All Forgotten How To Have Fun?

      Apr 8, 2021

      It was like a wasp attacking a good peach. I’d thought of little but the roadmap to freedom for ages. I’d started to plan. I ought to have known better. My road was to be paved with yellow bricks. I would brush my hair. I would pick my way across

      5 min read

    • Article

      Cristina Rivera Garza

      Jun 15, 2018

      She would remember everything, out of the blue and in full detail. She would see the jade ring wrapped around her ring finger and, immediately, she would see the other jade ring. She would open her eyes wide and, without knowing why, would fall silen

      13 min read

    • Article

      Removing The Mask

      Apr 25, 2021

      Removing The Mask
      5 min read

    • Article

      Pleasure Palace

      Sep 1, 2022

      Pleasure Palace
      15 min read

    • Article

      Novelist Caleb Azumah Nelson: ‘Why Would You Put A Ceiling On Anyone?’

      Apr 30, 2023

      Chaotic conditions in Peckham: brolly-ruining wind, sudden showers, one of those afternoons when the weather apps show every symbol from sunshine to lightning and leave you to figure it out. Caleb Azumah Nelson, the 29-year-old author and artist whos

      11 min read

    • Article

      No One Lives Here

      Mar 29, 2021

      FROM ISSUE #49: SURVIVAL STORIES GENEVIEVE ANNA TYRRELL is a visual artist and creative writer. She earned her BS in Electronic Media and Film at Towson University and her MFA in creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Her writing has

      8 min read

    • Article

      Wait Times

      Mar 29, 2021

      Wait Times
      16 min read

    • Article

      In An Age Of Screens, Looking For 'Attention' In All The Wrong Places

      Apr 8, 2020

      Casey Schwartz writes of her reliance on Adderall and her realization that the focus it brought was not genuine. But she leaves readers wanting to hear more on the relationship of attention and love.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Chosen

      Aug 2, 2018

      Chosen
      10 min read

    • Article

      Alan Alda's Experiment: Helping Scientists Learn To Talk To The Rest Of Us

      Jun 4, 2017

      The actor's new book, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?, is all about communication — and miscommunication — between doctors, scientists and civilians.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Morbidity & the Miniature

      May 11, 2018

      Morbidity & the Miniature
      14 min read

    • Article

      Small Comforts

      Feb 3, 2023

      Small Comforts
      9 min read

    • Article

      Exploring The Boundaries

      May 31, 2018

      The human body: a horse gliding through a field. A monkey skipping between branches. A comet hurtling through the black moors of space. The human body can be these things, or anything, without pain. Sontag famously declared that “everyone who is born

      16 min read

    • Article

      Prey

      May 10, 2021

      As I drove slowly towards the mob of angry protestors and my meeting with 200, I thought of 199. The ashes of a once hard man, staring at me with wide eyes that pleaded for hope like a dog begging for treats. I’d somehow found a way to give him that

      41 min read

    Reviews for The Betrayal

    4.5/5

    2 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      One of a few plays I am happy to reread/rewatch. Harold Pinter's inspiration for this was his long-term affair with Joan Bakewell, and he has said how he felt betrayed when he learnt that Joan's husband had known about the affair for a long time and not confronted him. And a wonderful exposure of human nature in the first scene when Jerry says, having heard talk that his ex-lover is seeing another man that he felt irritation that no one gossiped about us like that. Funny and painful, sparse mundane dialogue and plenty of pauses that speak a thousand thoughts. And an arresting back-to-front structure, so the audience know more than the characters as the play progresses. Wonderfully thought-provoking about relationships and what we remember about ourselves.
    • 5/5
      I studied Pinter years ago at school and fell in love with his plays. I was prompted to re-read Betrayal because of an imminent trip to see a theatre production and I had forgotten just how good a play this is. The dialogue is sparse and deceptively simple, but is sharp and cuts like a knife to the core of the play, 'I don't need to think about you.' The simple device of telling the story of an affair backwards enables Pinter to expose the complexities of the affair, enabling this play to transcend the mundane, and, as Samuel Beckett commented to Pinter, 'wrings the heart'.
    • 4/5
      An interesting twist on a familiar tale of infidelity - Pinter tells the story backwards. He begins at the end, and ends at the beginning, so you already sort of know how it's going to "end", but you stick around because he has hooked you by the peculiar twist. Without that gimmick, it might be just another familiar story with nothing to keep you in your seat. The dialogue is stark and nearly barren, but that can be misleading. It isn't so much the words the characters say as the interplay between the characters, what the words mean rather than strictly what they say.