The Unfortunate Englishman
The Unfortunate Englishman

Author: John Lawton

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0802190677

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A British agent is drawn to Berlin’s bridge of spies in this “superlative Cold War espionage story” from the author of the acclaimed Inspector Troy Novels (The Seattle Times). It’s the summer of 1961, and the inscrutable Khrushchev is developing plans for something that could change the course of the Cold War. As he and Kennedy gamble with the fate of millions of lives, Cockney East-Ender-turned-spy Joe Wilderness is thrust into the conflict. Enlisted by MI6 to set up shop in Berlin, Wilderness returns to the city where he spent his postwar years, where a former paramour is under threat, and where the dividing line between the West and the Soviets will soon be crossed. As the Russians start building the wall, two agents find themselves trapped on opposing sides: an unfortunate Englishman in the Lubyanka in Moscow, and a KGB operative in London’s Wormwood Scrubs. Now, Wilderness has a new mission: Swap the prisoners on Berlin’s bridge of spies. But, as a former black marketer, Wilderness is also working a personal angle—just to make it interesting, just to make it profitable, just to make it a little more dangerous. What can possibly go wrong? Named by the Daily Telegraph as one of “50 Crime Writers to Read before You Die,” John Lawton is “quite possibly the best historical novelist we have” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “[The Joe Wilderness novels] are meticulously researched, tautly plotted, historical thrillers in the mold of . . . Alan Furst, Phillip Kerr, Eric Ambler, David Downing and Joseph Kanon.” —The Wall Street Journal “Rich, inventive, surprising, informed, bawdy, cynical, heartbreaking and hilarious. However much you know about postwar Berlin, Lawton will take you deeper into its people, conflicts and courage. . . . Spy fiction at its best.” —The Washington Post

Hammer to Fall
Hammer to Fall

Author: John Lawton

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 0802148131

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British agent Joe Wilderness returns in “Lawton’s ongoing recreation of Cold War chicanery . . . one of the great pleasures of modern spy fiction” (Mick Herron, award-winning author of the Slough House series). It’s London, the swinging sixties, and by all rights, MI6 spy Joe Wilderness should be having as good a time as James Bond. But alas, his postings are more grim than glamorous. In the wake of an embarrassing disaster for MI6 in a divided Berlin, Wilderness is reprimanded with a posting to remote northern Finland under the guise of a cultural exchange program to promote Britain abroad. Bored by his work, with nothing to spy on, Wilderness strikes a deal with his old KGB pal Kostya to smuggle vodka into the USSR. But there is something fishy about why Kostya has suddenly turned up in Finland—and MI6 intelligence from London points to a connection with cobalt mining in the region, a critical component in the casing of the atomic bomb. Wilderness’s posting is getting more interesting by the minute, but more dangerous too. Moving from the no-man’s-land of Cold War Finland to the wild days of the Prague Spring, and populated by old friends—including Inspector Troy—and old enemies alike, Hammer to Fall is a gripping tale of deception and skullduggery, of art and politics—a page-turning story of the always-riveting life of the British spy. “Lawton scores another hit.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A jaw-dropping finale that will leave readers palpitating for more.” —Booklist (starred review) “A terrific thriller: fun, satisfying, and humane.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Then We Take Berlin
Then We Take Berlin

Author: John Lawton

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2013-09-03

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0802193080

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“A stylish spy thriller” of postwar Berlin—the first in a thrilling new series from the acclaimed author of the Inspector Troy Novels (TheNew York Times Book Review). John Wilfrid Holderness—aka Joe Wilderness—was a young Cockney cardsharp surviving the London Blitz before he started crisscrossing war-torn Europe as an MI6 agent. With the war over, he’s become a “free-agent gumshoe” weathering Cold War fears and hard-luck times. But now he’s being drawn back into the secret ops business when an ex-CIA agent asks him to spearhead one last venture: smuggle a vulnerable woman out of East Berlin. Arriving in Germany, Wilderness soon discovers he’s being played as a pawn in a deadly game of atomic proportions. To survive, he must follow a serpentine trail through his own past, into the confidence of an unexpected lover, and go dangerously deep into a black market scam the likes of which Berlin has never seen. The author of the acclaimed Inspector Troy Novels, “Lawton’s gift for atmosphere, memorable characters and intelligent plotting has been compared to John le Carré. . . . Never mind the comparisons—Lawton can stand up on his own, and Then We Take Berlin is a gem” (The Seattle Times). “[The Joe Wilderness novels] are meticulously researched, tautly plotted, historical thrillers in the mold of . . . Alan Furst, Phillip Kerr, Eric Ambler, David Downing and Joseph Kanon.” —The Wall Street Journal “[It] will thrill readers with an interest in WWII and the early Cold War era.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “A wonderfully complex and nuanced thriller.” —Kirkus Reviews

Sweet Sunday
Sweet Sunday

Author: John Lawton

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2014-11-04

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0802192378

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1969 is a time of turmoil and murder for a New York PI in this “twisty, sometimes terrifying” novel from the author of the acclaimed Inspector Troy Novels (Kirkus Reviews). New York PI Turner Raines is a has-been—and the things he has been include a broken civil rights worker, a second-rate lawyer, and a tenth-rate yippie reporter. But in 1969, as the USA is about to land a man on the moon and the Vietnam War is ripping the country to pieces, Raines is working as a skip tracer, making sure draft-dodgers are safe and sound in Canada. When Raines returns from Toronto, he discovers that his oldest friend, a left-wing journalist, has been murdered, and has taken his latest powder keg of a story to his grave. Following the trail of his buddy’s death, Turner hits the road for the Texas of his childhood, confronted anew with his divided family, and blown into the dangerous path of a band of brothers from ’Nam whose secrets could not only change Turner’s life but the country itself. “Atmospheric . . . absorbingly intelligent.” —Financial Times “John Lawton writes great thrillers. . . . He can hold his own with contemporaries Alan Furst and Phillip Kerr.” —Boston Herald

A Black Englishman
A Black Englishman

Author: Carolyn Slaughter

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2005-11-15

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780312424282

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"Isabel, a young woman in flight from the ravages of the Great War, throws herself headlong into a passionate and dangerous liaison with Sam, an Indian doctor, and Oxford graduate - but their devotion to one another takes them across the length and breadth of India and to the brink of disaster. This powerful and erotic love story combines the urgent and contemporary themes of colonial exploitation, race and sexuality, and compellingly explores the many forms of partition - secular and religious - that infect and endanger the modern world."--Publisher.

Old World, New World
Old World, New World

Author: Kathleen Burk

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 9780802144294

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A history of the relationship between Great Britain and the United States ranges from the establishment of the first English colony in the New World to the present day, examining both nations in terms of what connected them and what drove them apart.

Friends and Traitors
Friends and Traitors

Author: John Lawton

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Published: 2018-04-05

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 161185945X

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A newest novel in the Inspector Troy series, a tale of Cold War spy dealings centred around Guy Burgess. For readers of John le Carré, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst. It is 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev's visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being fifty so instead takes his entire family on 'the Grand Tour' for his fifty-first birthday: Paris, Siena, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries and concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam. After a concert in Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years - Guy Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: 'I want to come home.' Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to debrief Burgess - but when the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, the whole plan unravels with alarming speed and Troy finds himself a suspect. As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy discovers that Burgess is not the only ghost who has returned to haunt him...

The Fatal Englishman
The Fatal Englishman

Author: Sebastian Faulks

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0307523608

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In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.