John Burnham Schwartz

John Burnham Schwartz is the bestselling author of five novels, including Northwest Corner, The Commoner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. He has done extensive screen and television writing for the major Hollywood studios. In one of the most momentous events of the Cold War, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, abruptly abandoned her life in Moscow in 1967, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side is Peter Horvath, a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America. Thus, begins a complicated story with a complicated person at its center. Excited and alienated by her adopted country’s radically different society, Svetlana decides that all she yearns for is a simple American life. But an invitation from the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright leads Svetlana to join her cultlike community. When this ends in disillusionment, Svetlana reaches out to Peter. Their relationship changes and deepens, moving from America to England to the Soviet Union and back again, unfolding under the eyes of her CIA minders, and Svetlana’s and Peter’s private lives are no longer their own. Burnham Schwartz’s father was in fact the young lawyer who escorted Svetlana Alliluyeva to the United States. For The Red Daughter (Random House ) he draws on private papers and years of research to re-create the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman’s search for a new life and a place to belong. The New York Times Book Review
“The Red Daughter does exactly what good historical fiction should do: It sends you down the rabbit hole to read and learn more.”