Malcolm Knox – The Second Child

You can’t choose your family, but you can choose your enemies.

1945: It’s the dying days of the war. A triumphant Josef Stalin has the world’s future in his hands, but leading up to the Potsdam peace conference he is restless and paranoid, increasingly suspicious that his ambitious security overlord Lavrentiy Beria is plotting against him.

Beria has a secret weapon, his best friend’s daughter. A patriot and devotee of Papa Stalin, Melor Murtova has returned from a two-year exile to become Beria’s adopted daughter, and his eyes and ears among the nepo babies of the Kremlin.

In this palace of intrigue and deception, Melor must play a dangerous game, outwitting treacherous power plays and the capricious whims of her frenemies, while conducting a secret mission of her own: to find out who murdered her parents before her time runs out.

Against a backdrop of international politics, spying and the true-history intrigue of the closing days of World War Two, The Second Child is a chilling black comedy about survival in the court of madmen.

Malcolm Knox has written for the Sydney Morning Herald and has won three Walkley Awards and a Human Rights Award. His many non-fiction titles include Boom: The Underground History of Australia; From Gold Rush to GFC, which won the 2013 Ashurst Business Literature Prize; and Bradman’s War, shortlisted in the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His novels include Summerland; A Private Man, winner of the Ned Kelly Award; Jamaica, which won the Colin Roderick Award and was shortlisted in the 2008 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards; The Life; The Wonder Lover and Bluebird. The First Friend was shortlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Award and longlisted for the Sir Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

Paul Daley is an author, journalist, essayist and short story writer. His books have been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s History Prize and ACT Book of the Year. He has won two Walkley Awards and the National Press Club Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism. His essays have appeared in Meanjin and Griffith Review, and he writes ‘Postcolonial’, a column for The Guardian about Australian national identity, history and Indigenous culture. His literary novel Jesustown was published to great acclaim in 2022.