Honey for the Bears

A comic novel set in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. Paul Hussey, an English antiques dealer, travels to Leningrad with his young wife Belinda, planning to sell a set of smuggled dresses on the black market. Their trip becomes a muddle of suspicion, misunderstandings and awkward encounters with Soviet officials and the people they meet. Burgess uses the situation to poke fun at both Western and Eastern habits, and at marriage itself, in a lively, sharp-tongued story.