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Recent Reviews
John Le Carre
Rave The Washington Post ... it’s glimpses of the master novelist most readers will be eager for, and they’ll find them in his letters to family and avid readers; in appreciative notes to Graham Greene and avuncular advice to younger writers like Ben Macintyre; in his thanks to those who helped him with his research, smoothing his path as he traveled in search of honorable schoolboys and little drummer girls; and, just occasionally, in the flashes of the difficult man he was reputed to be, though these — understandably enough, in a volume intended to burnish his legacy rather than expose any dark side — are thin on the ground ... nobody would expect the creator of George Smiley — the master spy in the body of a bank manager — to be straightforward. Indeed, those of us for whom his work has been a lifelong source of complicated pleasure wouldn’t have it any other way ... edited and with illuminating notes by le Carré’s son Tim Cornwell, who sadly died before its publication, addresses both intimate and public themes, and in its closing pages offers a hint of future treasures.
John Le Carré
Positive The Guardian (UK) A shaky start aside – the opening scene doesn’t really earn its place in the novel – the book settles down eight pages in, and for one last time we’re in le Carré’s familiar world: its themes, its principals, its impeccable style ... Silverview has three outstanding set pieces, any one of which more than outweighs weaknesses of plot. Proctor’s interrogation of two retired colleagues, in which Edward Avon’s history is anatomised, is le Carré at his finest, revealing character and backstory through dialogue with an economy and grace beyond most writers ... where other genre writers might pump up their volumes with prolonged action sequences, here the conversational duelling is as exciting as a car chase ... With the publication of Silverview, it’s clear these virtues remained intact to the end. And if this final novel contains the occasional passage where we might feel we’ve been here before, such moments are tempered by the sadness of knowing we’ll never be here again.
Sonia Purnell
Rave The New York Review of Books That whispered-about legend she became during the war years in occupied France deserves to be loudly celebrated now ... Sonia Purnell’s excellent biography should help make that happen. If Virginia Hall herself remains something of an enigma — a testament, perhaps, to the skills that allowed her to live in the shadows for so long — the extraordinary facts of her life are brought onto the page here with a well-judged balance of empathy and fine detail. This book is as riveting as any thriller, and as hard to put down.
Lauren Wilkinson
Positive The New York Times Book Review \"It’s a relief... that Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy, while embracing ambitions and concerns that don’t always figure highly in the spy genre, is first and foremost a thriller ... Plenty to enjoy on its own terms, then, as a slick, well-observed thriller, but what adds depth are the perspectives offered by the central character ... challenging boundaries is what brave fiction does, and Wilkinson proves confident enough to carry it off. For a debut novel it’s remarkably assured, earning its genre stripes with panache, and addressing thought-provoking issues along the way.\
Lea Carpenter
Positive The New York Times Book Review Lea Carpenter’s Red, White, Blue is...less an unfolding story than a series of set pieces, using—rehearsing might be a better word—some of the tropes of the spy thriller. There’s nothing new about this: Many a self-consciously literary novelist has dipped a toe in the genre in order to examine themes of identity, betrayal, duplicity and so on. Few, though, have skated quite so lightly over the surface of the world they’re borrowing ... What the threads have in common is a kind of dreamlike, affectless prose that effectively nulls characterization ... And the individual sections are, if anything, overcrafted, each straining for its own little epiphany ... Narrative scaffolding, indeed, is conspicuous by its absence throughout, and while we’re told at one point that \'the order in which we receive facts matters,\' this isn’t borne out by the text, many of whose sections could be rearranged without fracturing the story. And yet, it weaves a spell. Though mannered and elliptical throughout, it’s more readable than those qualities usually herald, and in the end there’s something hypnotic about its stately, confessional prose. I’d hesitate to classify it as a spy novel, because it pretty clearly doesn’t want to get grubby. No: It’s a novel in which some of the characters are identified as spies. But in its contemplation of different kinds of lost innocence, it’s also pondering the fall.
Dan Fesperman
Positive The New York Times Book Review This novel stumbles at the outset ... But that bump in the road having been negotiated, what follows is a smooth ride, a novel belying its historical origins with a #MeToo slant ... The narrative choreography demanded by Fesperman’s split timelines is expertly handled, and... illustrates the kind of weight that the spy novel, in the right hands, is capable of bearing.