In 1950 Suzanne Rosenberg was arrested, falsely charged with treason, and sentenced to five years' imprisonment in one of Stalin's hard-labour camps. That experience is the central episode in "A Soviet Odyssey", a vivid insight into life in the USSR throughout the Stalin and war years. It is all the more powerful for being two stories in one: that of a young woman, eager for experience, in love with beauty and noble ideals, and that of the woman she became, who searches the past to understand what happened to her and the people she loved.