The Spy Game: A Novel - Hardcover

Harding, Georgina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596915897 ISBN 13: 9781596915893

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2009

Synopsis

A novel about one family trapped in the grand narratives of history.

On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna's mother disappears into the fog. A kiss that barely touches Anna's cheek, a rumble of exhaust and a blurred wave through an icy windshield, and her mother is gone. Looking back, Anna will wish that she could have paid more attention to the facts of that day. The adult world shrouds the loss in silence, tidies the issue of death away along with the things that her mother left behind. And her memories will drift and settle like the fog that covered the car.

That same morning a spy case breaks in the news―the case of the Krogers, apparently ordinary people who were not who they said they were; people who had disappeared in one place and reappeared in another with other identities, leading other lives. Obsessed by stories of the cold war and of the Second World War, which is still a fresh and painful memory for the adults around them, Anna's brother, Peter, begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was a spy working undercover, and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort between fact and fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how does anyone know who a person was once she is dead?

The Spy Game is a beautifully wrought novel about loss, history, memory, and imagination, and the way in which we shape these to construct our own identities. It is a painful and tender reminder of the importance of understanding the past and, in turn, the importance of letting go.

About this title

About the Author:

Georgina Harding is the author of the novel The Solitude of Thomas Cave and of two works of nonfiction: Tranquebar and In Another Europe. She lives in London and the Stour Valley, Essex, England.

From Publishers Weekly:

A British woman returns to the childhood loss of her German émigré 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.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1596915897
• ISBN 13: 9781596915893
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320