A chilling alternative history of the Second World War, in which the Nazis have conquered Britain
Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national
service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed
many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack
Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel,
The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of
books over the following decades. These varied from historical
fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian
alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction
books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears
and Folly).
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold
War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a
world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the
personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of
the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of
soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour
and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the
key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler,
Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.
Len Deighton is the Flaubert of the contemporary thriller
writers.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Deighton's best book ... an absorbingly exciting spy story that is
also a fascinating exercise in might-have-been speculation.
*New York Times Book Review*
Horrifyingly plausible.
*The Independent*
They don't, as they say, write them like this anymore. You will be
entertained, informed, thrilled and dazzled. Long may he, and his
creations, live on.
*The Guardian*
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