A couple of weekends ago, my wife-to-be decided to buy me a book from the charity bookshelves in our local supermarket. The small paperback she got set her back fifty pence and  is called ‘Light Sentence’ by Jenny Robertson. It was published in 1988.

My fiancé has quite the knack of ‘randomly’ finding me books that are relevant to my current  interests.

My attention has been concentrated on the Soviet Union, mainly Soviet Russia,  for quite some time now, especially between about 1919-1938, and I seem to be slowly building up a *very basic* understanding of this period of history in that region of the world, which makes it slightly easier to make sense of more recent times, during the Cold War period and beyond.

I am got going to go into much detail now, but I am about ten chapters into ‘Light Sentence’. Which I imagine to be set in the 1970s.

After reading the first chapter I managed to get in contact with the author, and she informed me that ‘Light Sentence’ is the second of three books: ‘Dark Journey’, ‘Light Sentence’, ‘Bright Dawn’.

It seems that they are all available via some of them very important secondhand-book merchants that can be found on Amazon and other virtual places where the cost of postage dwarfs the cost of the actual book.

The first page of ‘Light Sentence’ reads:

‘Koravia is a fictitious country, but the people and events of this book are based on real happenings.

    I dedicate this story to Anna Chertkova, Vladimir Khailo and Alexander Riga, all of whom have been in psychiatric hospital because of their religious beliefs, and to all those people worldwide who receive injections and drugs because of their beliefs’.

 

I hope that anybody reading this finds the information I’ve shared useful somehow.

 

Best wishes,

 

Frank.