Ethel Rosenberg: The Short Life and Great Betrayal of an American Wife and Mother

· Weidenfeld & Nicolson · Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy
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10 hr 22 min
Unabridged
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'A heart-piercingly brilliant book about a woman whose personal life put her in the cross-hairs of history' HADLEY FREEMAN
'Totally riveting. I couldn't put it down' VICTORIA HISLOP
'Ethel sings out for all women who have been misunderstood and wronged, and refuse to bow down' NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE
'A shocking tale of betrayal, naivety, misogyny and judicial failure' SONIA PURNELL
'A historic miscarriage of justice laid bare for our times' PHILIPPE SANDS

Ethel Rosenberg was a supportive wife, loving mother to two small children and courageous idealist who grew up during the Depression with aspirations to become an opera singer.

On 19 June 1953 she became the first woman in the US to be executed for a crime other than murder. She was thirty-seven years old.

Ethel's conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union followed what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the 'trial of the century' in Cold War America and is still controversial. Now, Anne Sebba's masterly, meticulously researched and deeply moving biography finally tells Ethel's true story - a life barbarically cut short on the basis of tainted evidence for a crime she almost certainly did not commit.

About the author

Anne Sebba is a historian and one of Britain's most distinguished biographers who began her career as a Reuters correspondent based in London and Rome. She has written eleven works of non-fiction, mostly about iconic twentieth-century women, which have been translated into several languages including French, Polish, Czech, Japanese and Chinese. She makes regular television and radio appearances and has presented two BBC radio documentaries about musicians. She is the author of the international bestseller That Woman, an acclaimed biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, and the prize-winning Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died Under Nazi Occupation. Her most recent book, Ethel Rosenberg: The Short Life and Great Betrayal of an American Wife and Mother, was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. Anne is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and trustee of the National Archives Trust. She lives in London.

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Narrated by Orlagh Cassidy