Owen Matthews has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 1★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Black Sun.
Black Sun
Summary
"Black Sun is fascinating and has fearsome authenticity." (Frederick Forsyth, number one New York Times best-selling author) "Thrilling and suspenseful." (Simon Sebeag Montefiore, New York Times best-selling author of The Romanovs) For fans of Red Sparrow and Child 44 comes a chilling and cinematic thriller set in 1961 in one of the most secretive locations in Soviet history. Ten days before the test of largest nuclear device in history, a KGB officer must investigate the murder of one of the architects of the bomb, and unravel a conspiracy that could set the world on fire. It is the dawn of the 1960s. In order to investigate the gruesome death of a brilliant young physicist, KGB officer Major Alexander Vasin must leave Moscow for Arzamas-16, a top-secret research city that does not appear on any map. There he comes up against the brightest, most cutthroat brain trust in Russia who, on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev himself, are building a nuclear weapon with 3,800 times the destructive potential of the Hiroshima bomb. RDS-220 is a project of such vital national importance that, unlike everyone else in the Soviet Union, the scientists of Arzamas-16 are free to think and act, live and love as they wish...as long as they complete the project and prove to their capitalist enemies that the USSR now commands the heights of nuclear supremacy. With intricately plotted machinations, secrets and surveillance, corrupt politicos and puppet masters in the Politburo, and one devastating weapon, Owen Matthews has crafted a timely, terrific, and fast-paced thriller set at the height - and in the heart - of Soviet power.
©2019 Owen Matthews (P)2019 Random House Audio
Stalin's Children
Summary
A transcendent history/memoir of one family’s always passionate, sometimes tragic connection to Russia. On a midsummer day in 1937, a black car pulled up to a house in Chernigov, in the heart of the Ukraine. Boris Bibikov - Owen Matthews’ grandfather - kissed his wife and two young daughters good-bye and disappeared inside the car. His family never saw him again. His wife would soon vanish as well, leaving Lyudmila and Lenina alone to drift across the vast Russian landscape during World War II. Separated as the Germans advanced in 1941, they were miraculously reunited against all odds at the war’s end. Some 25 years later, in the early 1960s, Mervyn Matthews - Owen’s father - followed a lifelong passion for Russia and moved to Moscow to work for the British embassy. He fell in and out with the KGB, and despite having fallen in love with Lyudmila, he was summarily deported. For the next six years, Mervyn worked day and night to get Lyudmila out of Russia, and when he finally succeeded, they married. Decades on from these events, Owen Matthews - then a young journalist himself in Russia - came upon his grandfather’s KGB file recording his “progress from life to death at the hands of Stalin’s secret police". Stimulated by its revelations, he has pieced together the tangled and dramatic threads of his family’s past and present, making sense of the magnetic pull that has drawn him back to his mother’s homeland. Stalin’s Children is an indelible portrait of Russia over seven decades and an unforgettable memoir about how we struggle to define ourselves in opposition to our ancestry only to find ourselves aligning with it. “I came to Russia to get away from my parents,” writes Matthews. “Instead I found them there, though for a long time I didn’t know it or refused to see it. This is a story about Russia and my family, about a place which made us and freed us and inspired us and very nearly broke us. And it’s ultimately a story about escape, about how we all escaped from Russia, even though all of us - even my father, a Welshman, who has no Russian blood, even me, who grew up in England - still carry something of Russia inside ourselves, infecting our blood like a fever.”
©2008 Owen Matthews (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Black Sun (German edition)
Summary
Sowjetunion, 1961: Major Alexander Vasin, Agent des KGB, wird mit einem Spezialauftrag in die isolierte Stadt Arsamas-16 geschickt. Er soll dort den mysteriösen Tod des jungen Physikers Fyodor Petrov untersuchen. In Arsamas-16 herrscht höchste Geheimhaltungsstufe, denn dort wird gerade die Testzündung der größten Wasserstoffbombe der Welt vorbereitet. Bei seinen Ermittlungen stößt Vasin auf eine Wand des Schweigens. Was versuchen die Forscher zu verbergen?
©2020 Lübbe Audio (P)2020 Lübbe Audio
An Impeccable Spy
Summary
Bloomsbury presents An Impeccable Spy by Owen Matthews, read by Mike Grady. Richard Sorge was a man with two homelands. Born of a German father and a Russian mother in Baku in 1895, he moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. A member of the angry and deluded generation who found new, radical faiths after their experiences on the battlefields of the First World War, Sorge became a fanatical communist - and the Soviet Union’s most formidable spy. Like many great spies, Sorge was an effortless seducer, combining charm with ruthless manipulation. He did not have to go undercover to find out closely guarded state secrets - his victims willingly shared them. As a foreign correspondent, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society in the years leading up to and including the Second World War. His intelligence regarding Operation Barbarossa and Japanese intentions not to invade Siberia in 1941 proved pivotal to the Soviet counteroffensive in the Battle of Moscow, which in turn determined the outcome of the war. Never before has Sorge’s story been told from the Russian side as well as the German and Japanese. Owen Matthews takes a sweeping historical perspective and draws on a wealth of declassified Soviet archives - along with testimonies from those who knew and worked with Sorge - to rescue the riveting story of the man described by Ian Fleming as 'the most formidable spy in history'.
©2019 Owen Matthews (P)2019 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc