Transcription by Kate Atkinson

The redoubtable novelist, Kate Atkinson, is greatly respected for the breadth of her topics, which range from reincarnation (Life After Life) to social history (Behind the Scenes at the Museum) to this one, involving the settling of debts between spies and their prey in the wake of the Second World War. 

At the ripe old age of eighteen, Juliet Armstrong is an attractive, highly educated, but impecunious young woman, who latches upon a lowly job, at the outset of war, as a paper-pusher in the Secret Services. Here she is "spotted" by MI5 and unwittingly groomed for stardom to infiltrate the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley's infamous league of Nazi sympathisers. The ensuing tale of avengers and avengees forms the basis of the tale.

A lighter version of John Le Carre, with a much more feminine twist, this is nonetheless robust and textured Atkinsonian fare, involving double agents, derring do, obscure Czechs, and flashbacks (the book begins with our heroine's demise), the whole anchored by a foggily evocative London setting, during and after the Blitz.

Slow to build, but steadily rewarding, this refreshingly clean spy novel, with its prodigious period detail (Baby Bellings, anyone?), is lightly infused with humour (an unusual amount of it in ruminative brackets), and is ideal for light, intelligent reading, involving a wartime plot, an engaging heroine, and plenty of period atmosphere.

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