HELEN RAPPAPORT’S THREE BOOKS on the Romanovs are compelling and beautifully written. I highly recommend Four Sisters for an in-depth look at the characters of the girls, Ekaterinburg for a chilling countdown of the final days of their lives, and The Race to Save the Romanovs for a gripping account of the attempts to rescue them. Greg King and Penny Wilson’s The Fate of the Romanovs contains a wealth of detail that I found invaluable. It was fascinating to read the diaries and letters of the family, which have been translated into English by Helen Azar. And I also valued Robert K. Massie’s The Romanovs: The Final Chapter and Andrew Cook’s The Murder of the Romanovs.

Treasure of the Tsars, a 2017 exhibition at the Hermitage in Amsterdam, had many poignant exhibits, including drawings by the children, clothes, and letters. I was also able to use my own memories of a visit to St. Petersburg in 2016, when I fell in love with the glitzy palaces and the exquisite Fabergé Museum.

While researching the period after the Revolution, I began with Orlando Figes’s brilliant and comprehensive book A People’s Tragedy. The exhibitions Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 at London’s Royal Academy in 2017 and Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths at the British Library in the same year were both invaluable. Actually seeing ration cards and photographs of factory life and communal living, then reading stories of individuals executed by the NKVD, made the era seem all the more real.

If you want to know about life in Stalinist Russia, the starting point has got to be Orlando Figes’s extraordinary book The Whisperers, which collects personal testimonies from survivors throughout the Soviet Union. I also found some compelling stories online, and there was useful information in the memoir My Life in Stalinist Russia by an American woman called Mary M. Leder.

Anna Reid’s masterful Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege is the best account I found of that period. She quotes liberally from diaries and personal accounts and provides the kind of detail that is a gift for a novelist. Alexis Peri’s The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad was also very useful, and I found several other accounts online.

Finally, while researching Sydney in the 1970s, I used a 1973 guide to the city entitled Ruth Park’s Sydney. I also had a wonderful reader in Sydney resident Gerrie Fletcher, and was helped by my own happy memories of a six-week stay in the city in the 1990s.

The Love Lives of the Romanov Daughters