January 12, 1917: An ocean liner docks in New York Harbor. Among the disembarking emigrants is one Lev Davidovich Bronshtein --- better known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky. Bronshtein has been on the run for a decade, driven from his beloved Russia after escaping political exile in Siberia. He lives for --- and is ready to sacrifice his life for --- a workers’ revolution, at any cost. But is he ready to become an American? In the weeks leading up to the February Revolution that will eventually see Lenin’s Bolsheviks seize power, Bronshtein haunts the streets, newspaper offices and socialist watering holes of New York City, wrestling with the difficult questions of his personal revolutionary ideology, his place in his own family, his relationship to Lenin and, above all, his conscience.

On Christmas Day, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a 10-minute televised speech announcing his resignation as Soviet president. Moments later, the red flag was lowered from its floodlit perch atop the Kremlin, and the Soviet Union ceases to exist. Into the vacuum surged the Russian mafia, supplying what the new state could not: krysha, or "roof" --- protection for the privately owned businesses sprouting up across the country. Rivalries turned bloody as Moscow's Jewish mafia battled the Ossete vory v zakone (literally "thieves-in-law") for control of the city. Caught up in the mayhem, Yulia, only daughter of the Jewish mafia godfather, and Roman, only son of the Ossete mafia godfather, navigated the minefield of a star-crossed love affair as they attempt to escape a destiny that appears preordained.

In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow’s deluxe Hotel Metropol. They have gathered to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. The ladies, each of whom could claim to have been a muse to the poet, loved or loathed Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their conflicting memories of him, a portrait of the artist as a young idealist emerges. Their recollections reveal Mayakovsky as a passionate, complex, sexually obsessed creature trapped in the epicenter of history, struggling to hold onto his ideals in the face of a revolution betrayed.

Former CIA agent Lemuel Gunn works as a private investigator from his mobile home. Into his life comes Ornella Neppi, who’s making a hash out of her uncle’s bail bonds business. The source of her troubles, Emilio Gava, was arrested for buying cocaine. He’s jumped bail, and now she’s about to pay the price for it. Curiously, no photographs of Gava seem to exist. Once Gunn begins his search, it becomes unclear whether Gava even existed in the first place.

When Kim Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, he became the most notorious double agent in the history of espionage. Recruited into His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service at the beginning of World War II, he rose rapidly in the ranks to become the chief liaison officer with the CIA in Washington after the war. Robert Littell recounts the little-known story of the spy's early years.