A.D. Miller’s gripping new book is set largely during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which Miller covered as a journalist. Ten years later, I reported on the aftermath of the country’s 2014 Euromaidan Revolution. Independence Square details the first event and prefigures the second. It is several things: a thriller, a political novel and a statement on our times.
It tells the story of Simon, a disgraced British diplomat who, one day on the Tube, sees the cause (so he believes) of his downfall. She is a woman called Olesya whom he met years earlier during the Orange Revolution. From this beginning the novel unfurls, switching between 2004 and the present day.
Back in 2004 the protestors are angry and the government is getting desperate. Violence looms. Simon, as a senior diplomat, wants to do his bit.
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