A very expensive poison - Luke Harding

1st November 2006: Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. Twenty-two days later he dies, killed from the inside by Polonium - a rare, lethal and highly radioactive substance. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia.

This is the inside story of the life and death of Litvinenko and of Russia's new cold war with the west. Harding traces the journey of the nuclear poison across London, from hotel room to nightclub, assassin to victim. It's a deadly trail that leads back to Vladimir Putin, and to a regime exposed by the Panama Papers.

Luke Harding's investigation into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, A Very Expensive Poison, may also help us shed light on the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury. From the author of the No.1 New York Times bestseller Collusion.

Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war and in summer 2022 put him on an official blacklist. He is the author of Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (nominated for the Orwell Prize) and The Snowden Files. Two of Harding's books have been made into films; The Fifth Estate and Snowden.

An expert chronicle of a sensational but opaque crime, and of the terrifying lawlessness it epitomised. Enthralling.
A.D. Miller, author of Snowdrops

This extraordinarily pacy book - I downed it in two sessions - by the Guardian's former Moscow correspondent is one of the best political thrillers I have come across in years. It is also a wonderful guide to criminality and power in today's Russia - Boris Godunov pals up with the Cosa Nostra, as it were.
Evening Standard

Harding, a former Moscow correspondent for The Guardian, tells this ghastly tale with real authority, wit and panache ... The book is as "definitive" as it claims, though "national security" means that the MI6 aspect of the story will never emerge. It is not only Russia that needs a change.
The Times

Gripping ... Harding doesn't overcook the metaphor, but Mayfair and all it represents is portrayed here as something potentially, maybe inherently toxic. When does a soft power aimed at attracting investment start to undermine real power?
London Review of Books - Peter Pomerantsev

Pacy and impassioned ... Harding paints deft portraits of the tragi-comic duo suspected of carrying out the crime.
New Statesman

A Very Expensive Poison reads like a John Le Carr spy novel, but shockingly it's all true. Luke Harding has followed the criminality of the Putin regime from Russia to the West and his story leaves us with terrible feeling of dread about what Putin will do next.
Bill Browder, author of Red Notice

When Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, the media speculation was frenzied. Yet, even the most fevered journalistic fantasy failed to come close to the truth. Luke Harding lays out every detail of his murder, connecting it in thrillerish detail to the dark undercurrents of life in today's Russia.
Oliver Bullough, The Last Man in Russia: And The Struggle To Save A Dying Nation

This book convincingly shows that the death of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 was state-sponsored murder. Luke Harding has written a story that is horrific, instructive and, at times, hilarious. He is a masterful storyteller and an impeccable researcher.
Federico Varese, author of The Russian Mafia

Luke Harding has been reporting on this story for years, hunting down key witnesses and digging for new evidence. As a result, he has managed to provide the most thorough and vivid reconstruction of Alexander Litvinenko's assassination.
Andrei Soldatov

His work is the most precious thing that could exist.

Harding is a reporter, a great journalist and his story never strays from everyday life and the news.

Here comes Harding, who intimately and lucidly links seemingly distant events to help us understand that our focus must always be aimed at and protect the most precious asset of all. It is not a gift, but it is ours by right: freedom.


What makes a journalist a great journalist is an obsession... that can poison family relationships and that certainly is poisoning relations with colleagues and friends. ...Harding has a sworn enemy: 'Putin's mafia government "and a goal: to tell what port the absence of democracy.