The Company of Strangers - Softcover

Wilson, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006512038 ISBN 13: 9780006512035

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2002

Synopsis

Stunning European-based thriller from an acclaimed young British author: ‘A class act’ – Sunday Times; ‘First in a field of one’ – Literary Review

Lisbon 1944. In the torrid summer heat, as the streets of the capital seethe with spies and informers, the endgame of the Intelligence war is being silently fought.

Andrea Aspinall, mathematician and spy, enters this sophisticated world through a wealthy household in Estoril. Karl Voss, military attaché to the German Legation, has arrived embittered by his implication in the murder of a Reichsminister and traumatized by Stalingrad, on a mission to rescue Germany from annihilation. In the lethal tranquility of this corrupted paradise they meet and attempt to find love in a world where no-one can be believed.

After a night of extreme violence, Andrea is left with a lifelong addiction to the clandestine world that leads her from the brutal Portuguese fascist régime to the paranoia of Cold War Germany, where she is forced to make the final and the hardest choice.

About this title

Review:

Robert Wilson, whose award-winning A Small Death in Lisbon broke him out as an international thriller writer in the Ambler, le Carré, and Furst tradition, scores with this exceptionally well-plotted novel of wartime intrigue in England and Portugal. Andrea Aspinall, a brilliant young British mathematician, is recruited by the British Secret Service and put through a rush course in spycraft before being sent to Lisbon, where she quickly falls in love with a disenchanted German agent and, in less than two weeks, manages to lose her virginity, unmask a conspiracy, and interrupt Germany's plan to build the first atomic bomb. The action covers a long time span--from the early years of Word War II to the era of glasnost, when Andrea, now an Oxford mathematician long retired from spying, encounters the man she once loved and lost. Karl Voss has become an East German double agent who's bent on revealing the Russian mole in England's service. The narrative wanders a bit, but the strong, spare writing and deft characterization set this apart as one of the year's better international espionage novels, one that should introduce Wilson to a bigger audience. --Jane Adams

Book Description:

Published in hardcover by Harcourt, 2001, 0-15-100846-9

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0006512038
• ISBN 13: 9780006512035
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400