BOOKS Zugzwang
By Ronan Bennett
Bloomsbury £14.99
FT bookshop price: £11.99
Spring 1914, St Petersburg shivers. Fortunately, our narrator’s voice is lucid, measured and intelligent. He is the psychiatrist Spethmann, who first appears as a complacent survivor in a world of justified paranoia but is soon revealed to have his own passions – dangerous ones. His tone of dry analysis only heightens our awareness of the ever-encroaching dark.
