Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia - Couverture souple

In 2007 Luke Harding arrived in Moscow to take up a new job as a correspondent for the British newspaper the Guardian. Within months, mysterious agents from Russia's Federal Security Service - the successor to the KGB - had broken into his flat. He found himself tailed by men in cheap leather jackets, bugged, and even summoned to Lefortovo, the KGB's notorious prison.

The break-in was the beginning of an extraordinary psychological war against the journalist and his family. Vladimir Putin's spies used tactics developed by the KGB and perfected in the 1970s by the

Stasi, East Germany's sinister secret police. This clandestine campaign burst into the open in 2011 when the Kremlin expelled Harding from Moscow - the first western reporter to be deported from Russia since the days of the Cold War.

Mafia State: How one reporter became an enemy of the brutal new Russia is a brilliant and haunting account of the insidious methods used by a resurgent Kremlin against its so-called "enemies" -

human rights workers, western diplomats, journalists and opposition activists. It includes unpublished material from confidential US diplomatic cables, released last year by WikiLeaks, which describe Russia as a "virtual mafia state".

Harding gives a unique, personal and compelling portrait of today's Russia, two decades after the end of communism, that reads like a spy thriller.

Someone has broken into my flat. Three months after arriving in Russia as the Guardian's new Moscow bureau chief, I return home from a dinner party. At first, everything appears normal.

And then I see it. It is a strange detail. The window of my son's bedroom is wide open. The dark symbolism of the open window is not hard to decipher: take care, or your kids might just fall out.

I find myself in a new world. It is a place of unknown rules, of thuggish adversaries. But who are these ghosts? And who sent them?

Mafia State is Guardian correspondent Luke Harding's harrowing personal account of the insidious methods used by a resurgent Kremlin against its so-called "enemies" - human rights workers, western diplomats, opposition activists ... and journalists.

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, as well as in other

conflict zones. He is the co-author of two previous books: WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on

Secrecy and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, nominated for the Orwell Prize.