Stalin’s Children (Walker, $26) profiles three remarkable generations of one family in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. Newsweek’s Moscow bureau chief Owen Matthews balances personal memoir with historical artifact to provide a vivid account of his half-Russian, half-British family. Matthews’s grandfather was a Soviet propagandist who disappeared in Stalin’s purges, leaving Matthews’s mother, Lyudmila, an orphan. His father was an Oxford student courted by the KGB but expelled from the USSR after he fell in love with Lyudmila. With recourse to KGB files, love letters, his own empathy and narrative talent, Matthews offers an enthrallingly personal story of seemingly impersonal forces and events. Matthews’s family was affected by everything from the first five-year plan to Stalin’s funeral, from Gorbachev’s college years to the USSR’s collapse. A lot of history—but when put in the perspective of one remarkable family, fascinating and comprehensible.