Berlin Game (Penguin Modern Classics)

Masterly ... dazzlingly intelligent and subtle Sunday TimesDeightons best novel to date - sharp witty and sour like Raymond Chandler adapted to British gloom and the multiple betrayals of the spy ObserverEmbattled agent Bernard Samson is used to being passed over for promotion as his younger more ambitious colleagues - including his own wife Fiona - rise up the ranks of MI6. When a valued agent in East Berlin warns the British of a mole at the heart of the Service Samson must return to the field and the city he loves to uncover the traitors identity. This is the first novel in Len Deightons acclaimed Game Set and Match trilogy.A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL Review TheBerlin Game trilogy made lockdown possible. -- Olivia LaingDeightons outstanding achievement is the nine-volume series chronicling the life and times of Bernard Samson ... Deightons 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 StatesmanSpying at its most captivating and intricate. -- Marcel Berlins ―The TimesDeightons best novel to date - sharp witty and sour like Raymond Chandler adapted to British gloom and the multiple betrayals of the private spy. ―ObserverVirtuoso top level performance. ―The GuardianSheer consistent rightness page after page after page. ―The TimesA labyrinthine espionage epic lightened with laconic wit. -- Jeremy Duns ―The TimesDeighton as always makes the familiar twists and turns of spy errantry new again partly by his grip of narrative partly by his grasp of character and partly by his easy sardonic tone. ―New YorkerLen Deightons spy novels are so good they make me sad the Cold War is over. -- Malcolm Gladwell About the Author 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 Kerouacs 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. Deightons 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 Carré.