The Instrument-Maker: A Novel

Sofia, 1944. Moscow. Vienna. Cairo. Damascus. Beirut. Paris, 1968. Yuri comes down out of the Vitosha hills a partisan and is, within three years, selected, tested, and remade in Moscow as an intelligence officer. Over the decades that follow, across a continent and a Cold War, he becomes a builder of instruments-a maker of operatives out of other human beings. In Paris in 1968, he finds his last and most complete one: a young violinist named Joseph. Where The Instrument is the story of the recruit, The Instrument-Maker is the story of the recruiter: the patience, the calculation, and the cost of constructing an operative out of someone else's life. Told from Yuri's side across a lifetime spent making instruments of other people, the novel closes decades later with an old man confronting what the work made of him. Companion novel to The Instrument. Together, the two books form a single event seen from both sides of the table.