Sarah Rainsford

A unique, personal insight into Vladimir Putin's Russia and the devastating impact his rule has had on his own people and those of neighbouring Ukraine. In 2021, BBC journalist Sarah Rainsford set out to write a book about how Russians who dared to think differently to the Putin regime were being labelled as enemies, foreign agents and even traitors. It was to chart Russia's slide from democracy and warn of where the crushing of liberties could lead. She had experienced something of that herself when she was expelled from Moscow as a supposed 'security threat'. Then, in February 2022, Putin began his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, moving faster than her worst fears. This is the story of how Vladmir Putin changed Russia so deeply that he was able to launch the biggest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Sarah's focus is on the extraordinary characters she has encountered, from the Russians such as Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny who paid with their lives for challenging Putin, to the Ukrainians she found burying their dead in Bucha. It is also her own personal reckoning with Russia, where she first lived in the 1990s: a country she saw emerge from decades of authoritarian rule to embrace new freedoms, that has now quashed internal dissent and declared a ruinous war on its neighbour. The culmination of many years of on-the-ground reporting, Goodbye to Russia shines a light on the attacks on freedom that she has witnessed and paints an intimate portrait of the individuals who have tried to resist.

Graham Greene saw the Castros rise; Sarah Rainsford watched them leave. From the street where Wormold, the hapless hero of Greene's Our Man in Havana, plied his trade, BBC foreign correspondent Rainsford reports on Fidel's reshaping of a nation, and what the future holds for ordinary Cubans now that he and his brother Raul are no longer in power. Through tales of literary ghosts and forgotten reporters, believers in the revolution and dissidents, entrepreneurs optimistic about the new Cuba and the disillusioned still looking for a way out, Our Woman in Havana paints an enthralling picture of this enigmatic country as it enters a new era.

From inside this tightly controlled one-party state, Sarah Rainsford, the BBC's `woman in Havana' for three years, reports on lives shaped by Fidel Castro's giant social experiment and how the nation feels as the six-decade rule of the Castros comes to an end. Seeking a window into pre-revolutionary Cuba, she searches for the ghosts of Graham Greene's Havana and the paths walked by other visiting writers hooked on a city where `every vice was permissible'. Through all these stories and those still being told, Our Woman in Havana weaves an enthralling, atmospheric portrait of this enigmatic country as it teeters, once more, at a historic crossroads.