The publication of Children of the Arbat in 1988 established Anatoli Rybakov as one of the most important Russian authors of the century. Now, in a long-awaited novel - the first since his magnificent international bestseller - Rybakov has written Fear: a stunning account of Stalin's purges.

Rybakov brings alive a generation and a nation on the brink of self-destruction with the story of Sasha Pankratov, a young man sent into Siberian exile after a flippant and inadvertently impolitic remark in a school newspaper.

No longer the idealistic youth of Rybakov's first novel, but a knowledgeable victim with hard-won wisdom, Sasha is released to make his way across a country where the mass arrests have continued, but the Party faithful - the original creators of the Bolshevik Revolution - are now subject to arrest, torture, trial, and death.

In his profound rendering of Stalin's mind and personality, Rybakov proves his extraordinary skills as both historian and craftsman. His depiction of the dynamics of terrorism is equally deft: the psychological molding of a once hopeful generation into fearful, self-protective informers; and, even more devastating, Stalin's conscious twisting of a self-serving but essentially banal bureaucracy into a horde of prosecutorial demons whose zeal and inventiveness surpass Torquemada's inquisitors.

At once an epic saga, a chilling exposition of terrorism, and a deeply etched, unmatched portrait of Stalin, Fear confirms Rybakov's stature among the classic historical writers of our time.