TRANSCRIPTION by Kate Atkinson

A Kate Atkinson spy novel?  What’s not to love?  Plucky eighteen-year-old Juliet Armstrong interviews for a job in 1940 as a typist for MI5.  Her interviewer asks her which she would choose if a gun were held to her head—Communism or Fascism.  She cleverly dodges the question by choosing the gun and tells capricious lies during the course of the interview.  Atkinson has always been a master of witty and often sarcastic dialog, and this book shows off the author’s talent in that regard, as well as reminding us how well she can spin a good yarn.  Juliet’s job description vaults from transcribing taped conversations among English Nazi sympathizers to taking on a new identity as, well, a Nazi sympathizer.  Her audacity suffers a setback when she discovers that undercover work is not all fun and games but more a matter of life and death.  A decade later we find Juliet working as a producer for the BBC, but her MI5 work has not totally ended.  Apparently, once a spy, always a spy, although she seems anxious to put the war years behind her.  She runs into a man whom she worked with during the war, and he pretends not to recognize her.  Pair that with a threatening note, and we have suspense that totally reeled me in.  The whole clandestine aspect of this novel—changing watchwords and leaving newspapers on benches for other operatives to retrieve, for example—makes it ever so addictive and thoroughly entertaining.  And the ending will make your head spin.  It demands a reread.