An Officer And A Spy (Thorndike Press Large Print Core) - Hardcover

Harris, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410468437 ISBN 13: 9781410468437

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2014

Synopsis

A tale inspired by the infamous Dreyfus Affair finds recently promoted head of Paris's late-19th-century counterespionage agency Georges Picquart leading the effort to convict Dreyfus only to succumb to gradual doubts that a high-level spy remains at large in the military. (espionage).

About this title

Review:

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, February 2014: A spy thriller and psychological examination, Robert Harris’s An Officer and a Spy looks at the infamous Dreyfus affair through the personage of a functionary-turned-whistle-blower. It’s Paris, 1895. A Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, has been convicted of treason and is imprisoned on Devil’s Island; he has been publicly humiliated, bound in chains, banished to solitary confinement. But was he really a spy for Germany--or was his fate sealed because he was a Jew in an anti-Semitic time and place? Slowly, the petit bureaucrat Georges Picquart begins to suspect that Dreyfus--portrayed here mostly through heart-wrenching real-life letters he wrote from prison to his beloved family--has been scapegoated. As Picquart amasses more and more evidence about Dreyfus, he also must come to terms with some of his own behaviors and attitudes. Still, for all its delicious detail about the mores of Belle Epoque Paris, both social and political, this novel is also one for the ages, or at least for the ages in which powerful intelligence agencies, government surveillance and cover-ups are worrisomely becoming the norm. --Sara Nelson

About the Author:

Robert Harris's work has been translated into thirty-seven languages, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has been a television correspondent for the BBC, political editor of The Observer, and a columnist for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. He lives in a village near Hungerford in Berkshire, England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1410468437
• ISBN 13: 9781410468437
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 694