The Diamond Eye
Mila Pavlichenko is a young history student and single mother in Kyiv when the German army pours across the Soviet border in 1941, and she volunteers for the Red Army with a rifle she learned to shoot at a shooting club. Over the next year she becomes Lady Death, a sniper credited with more than three hundred kills on the Eastern Front, and is then pulled out of combat and sent on a goodwill tour of the United States, where she befriends Eleanor Roosevelt and unwittingly becomes the target of a plot closer to home than any battlefield. Kate Quinn builds her novel on the real Pavlichenko's memoirs, pairing trench-level detail with political intrigue for a propulsive historical thriller about the costs, personal and public, of becoming a weapon.
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What you might want to know about The Diamond Eye
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Kate Quinn fictionalizes the life of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Kiev grad student turned Red Army sniper who racked up 309 confirmed kills against the Wehrmacht and toured the United States as a war hero in 1942.
Yes. The Diamond Eye is fictional but built around the real Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most successful female sniper in history with 309 confirmed kills during World War II. Kate Quinn researched her documented life extensively.
No. The Diamond Eye is a standalone, but Kate Quinn has written several other historical novels with World War II women including The Alice Network, The Huntress, and The Rose Code.
The Diamond Eye was written by Kate Quinn, published in 2022 by HarperCollins Publishers.
The Diamond Eye is a standalone novel by Kate Quinn, not part of a series.
The Diamond Eye is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.