NPR

In 'Red Sky At Noon,' A Western On The Eastern Front

Simon Sebag Montefiore's new novel, set during World War II, follows a Jewish political prisoner who's pressed into a battalion of convicts and Cossacks and sent to fight the Nazis on horseback.

Benya Golden is a Jewish Cossack. Which is not the setup for a Mel Brooks movie, but the new novel by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Golden is a prisoner in a Soviet gulag during World War II, and he ends up pressed into a kind of Dirty Dozen battalion of horse-riding Cossacks and convicts who

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