In the golden age of US-USSR relations during perestroika, Justin Lifflander sets off for provincial Russia to live outside the gate of a Soviet nuclear missile factory and work as an inspector-janitor-chef on the U.S. monitoring team. There he falls in love with his KGB-assigned "escort" in a memoir that reminds us that our enemies are never as unknowable as we think or as easy to fathom as we'd like.
