The Company of Strangers - Hardcover

Wilson, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151008469 ISBN 13: 9780151008469

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001

Synopsis

The award-winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon brings an exciting richness to the long shadow of evil in this crackling new novel of spycraft and international intrigue.

Lisbon, 1944:
Andrea Aspinall, plucked out of academia by British intelligence so that her mathematical knowledge might help in the hunt for atomic secrets, disappears under a new identity in Lisbon, where such secrets are easily bought and sold.
Karl Voss, already experienced in the illusions of intrigue when he arrives in Lisbon, is an attache at the German Legation, though he is secretly working against the Nazis to rescue Germany from annihilation.

After a night of terrible violence, Andrea creates a family for herself from Voss's memory and the clandestine world they knew. In Portugal, in England, and in the chilly world of Cold War Berlin, she discovers that the deepest secrets aren't held by governments-and that death is a relative term. In The Company of Strangers, Robert Wilson takes the chilling irony of "secret intelligence" to a new and more poignant human level, as he shows that the heart is both more knowing and more secretive than the mind.

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

About the Author:

Robert Wilson is the author of five previous novels, including A Small Death in Lisbon, which won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year from Britain's Crime Writers Association. He lives with his wife in an isolated farmhouse in Portugal.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0151008469
• ISBN 13: 9780151008469
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480