In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House ... So begins Julian Barnes's first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending, a story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage. A masterpiece - based on the life of Dmitri Shostakovich.