The Shoemaker and His Daughter is an epic story spanning the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union, taking in eighty years of Soviet and Russian history, from Stalin to Putin.

Conor O¿Clery holds a unique perspective on the former Soviet Union, as resident Irish Times correspondent during the last four years of communism and as a frequent visitor since then, having married into a Russian-Armenian family in Krasnoyarsk. After Moscow he was a foreign correspondent in Washington, Beijing and New York. He has been twice awarded Journalist of the Year, for his dispatches from Moscow and for his reporting of the 9/11 attacks in New York. He is the author of several books including Melting Snow, on the fall of the Soviet Union; The Greening of the White House, about the Clinton presidency, The Billionaire Who Wasn¿t, a biography of the philanthropist Chuck Feeney; and Moscow, December 25, 1991, an account of the last day of the Soviet Union.