Spy Hook

In Deighton’s best books - like this one - the narrative glides forward on rollers, and the scenes and characters fit perfectly into place. The result is marvellous entertainment. * Independent *Vintage, treble-crossing, East-West intrigue … written with Deighton’s usual punch and economy. * Daily Mail *Len Deighton is the Flaubert of the contemporary thriller writers. – Michael Howard * Times Literary Supplement *Deighton’s outstanding achievement is the nine-volume series chronicling the life and times of Bernard Samson … Deighton’s Samson trilogies are as much about the elusiveness of human interactions as espionage. Spying is not a secret world sealed off from ordinary life but an extension of the world we all live in. – John Gray * New Statesman *

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.

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