The Spy Game

From Publishers Weekly A British woman returns to the childhood loss of her German ?migr? mother in this moody, gloomy novel by the author of The Solitude of Thomas Cave . Anna is eight years old and living in London in 1961 when her mother dies in a car accident. As children, Anna and her brother, Peter, intuit something suspicious about their mother's death, and together they conclude that their mother must not be dead, and that she must be a Soviet spy. Peter, on holiday from boarding school, teaches Anna about cryptography, while Anna searches out irregularities in the behavior of her mother's former friends. As they spy on their neighbors, their paranoia grows out of hand. Interwoven throughout is a plot in the present day, when Anna, dissatisfied with her understanding of her mother's life and death, digs into her mother's past. Harding is a fine portraitist when it comes to sketching the children, their father and friends, but the shifts between present and past never fully integrate the suggestion of espionage into the otherwise effective story of children coping with loss. (Apr.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From On a cold English morning in the winter of 1961, Caroline Wyatt drives off into the fog—and disappears from the lives of her children, eight-year-old Anna and 10-year-old Peter. “Your mummy’s gone to heaven,” they’re told but little else. Given the news that dominates the headlines—stories of undercover agents who seem like ordinary neighbors—and given their mother’s German accent, the children begin to imagine that she was a spy, that her death was faked, that she was part of a prisoner swap. Peter becomes obsessed; Anna wants to quit the game but finds she can’t. Their quiet father’s reluctance to speak only feeds their suspicions. Eventually, they grow up, and Anna, in a present-time story that frames her recollections, at last undertakes actual research about Caroline: what she learns is both more prosaic and more profound than what she imagined. Spare, precise, and elegaic, Harding’s moving second novel (after The Solitude of Thomas Cave, 2007) explores the ways we invent ourselves, the unknowability of others, and the lacks that define us more than anything we possess. --Keir Graff An unforgettable, suspenseful novel about childhood, grief and Cold War paranoia'Harding skilfully weaves together history, memory and imagination in this haunting and beautifully written novel about how, chameleon-like, we construct our own identities'Daily MailOn a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna's mother disappears into the fog.That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. Obsessed by stories of espionage, Anna's brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was an undercover spy and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort fact from fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life?And how do you know who a person was when she's already dead? An unforgettable, suspenseful novel about childhood, grief and Cold War paranoia On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna's mother disappears into the fog. That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. Obsessed by stories of espionage, Anna's brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was an undercover spy and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort fact from fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead?