![]() ![]() We first meet Juliet in 1981, when she is sixty years old. ![]() A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat.’ At first, Juliet is taken, along with many other young women, to work at Wormwood Scrubs prison, but she is soon transferred to a residential flat, where she has to transcribe conversations between a man posing as German Intelligence, and the Fascist sympathisers who come to speak to him. When she is working as a producer at the BBC some ten years later, however, she is ‘unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. ![]() ‘Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying.’ Once the war finishes and Juliet’s contract is terminated, she tries to put the experience firmly behind her. The heroine of the piece, Juliet Armstrong, is ‘reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage’ during the Second World War. ![]() The Sunday Telegraph comments that ‘no other contemporary novelist has such supreme mastery of that sweet spot between high and low, literary and compulsively readable as Kate Atkinson.’ I could not agree more. Here, as in her other books, she focuses upon a cast of unusual and realistic protagonists, using her characteristically intelligent and quirky prose. Kate Atkinson has been one of my absolute favourite authors since I was in my mid-teens and, like many other readers, I was eager to pick up a copy of her newest standalone novel, Transcription. ![]()
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