The Company of Strangers (Hardcover)

This tale of divided loyalties and a bitter war fought behind polite façades is Wilson's most ambitious and sprawling novel yet, set in the stupefying heat of Lisbon in 1944. We are vividly shown a city that echoes Bogart's Casablanca, where spies and informers make every conversation a minefield. The Germans have developed rocket technology, and are on the brink of atomic breakthrough. The allies are keen to stop the German secret weapon, and their operative is Andrea Aspinall, a young mathematician struggling to come to terms with the sophisticated world in which she finds herself. Andrea meets Karl Voss, a military attaché to the German legation, who is embittered and compromised by his part in the death the Reichsminister, and traumatised by the death of his beloved brother in Stalingrad. This ill-assorted couple attempts to forge a relationship in a world of treachery and death. After a terrifying climax, the novel moves to the paranoid world of Cold War Germany, and Andrea finds that she must make grim choices in a snowbound East Berlin.

Wilson tackles his epic canvas with the kind of assurance that is no surprise to his admirers, and at nearly 500 pages, this is truly a book of ambitious reach. But Wilson's speciality is, of course, characterisation, and both Andrea and Voss are painted with the utmost subtlety and intelligence. Andrea's development from naive young girl to the woman that war makes of her is very sharply handled. It must be said, though, that this may not be the best novel for those new to Wilson: after a mesmerising opening scene with Voss watching Hitler's madness infect those around him, the author undoubtedly takes his time to create his minutely detailed world, and the tautness of the early books is replaced by a more leisurely inclusiveness reminiscent of late le Carré. But those who allow themselves to fall under the author's Ancient Mariner-like spell will find this among his most rewarding and complex novels. --Barry Forshaw

Praise for A Small Death in Lisbon 'An interesting...impressive novel' Sunday Telegraph 'A large book in every way...A highly satisfying book, part thriller, part psychological mystery and part novel of ideas. And it is superbly well written' Irish Times 'Complex and fascinating, the novel provides a memorable picture of the intrigue-ridden neutral city in 1941' The Times

Wilson won the Crime Writer's Gold Dagger award for A Small Death in Lisbon in 1999 and this, his next novel, also uses Lisbon as a setting. It is, however, a wartime Lisbon in a Portugal with its own fascist government and secret police, not to mention a high population density of spies of every ilk. Two spies in particular prove to be star-crossed lovers from warring families: Karl Voss, an embittered and disillusioned German army officer now plotting the assassination of Hitler, and Andrea Aspinall, a young British mathematician who has been pitched unprepared into a cauldron of cross and double-cross. The two meet, fall in love and manage to survive an intelligence operation which goes murderously - and very excitingly - wrong, only to find themselves still on opposite sides as the Cold War sets in and the action moves to east Berlin in the 1970s. Wilson's long and ambitious saga of relationships forged in a clandestine world where no-one can be trusted adds a new dimension to the unfashionable genre of espionage novels. This is romantic, almost passionate, spy fiction rather than nail-biting edge-of-the-seat stuff but it still carries a mighty sting in its tail. (Kirkus UK)

Wilson ("A Small Death in Lisbon", 2000, etc.) uses the hopeless love affair between an amateur British agent and a desperate German officer to focus on two generations of European espionage, treachery, and double-dealing. Before the Blitz, mathematician Andrea Aspinall had led a sheltered life. Only the horrific death of her piano teacher, who had taken the place of the Portuguese father she never knew, makes her ripe for recruitment to the Company, as her mother's colleagues clannishly call themselves. Her knowledge of German and Portuguese makes her the ideal ingenue, disguised as "Anne Ashworth," to infiltrate suspect Irish businessman Patrick Wilshere's house in a Lisbon suburb in summer 1944 and nose out any traces of the industrial diamonds the Company is convinced are being sold to the Reich as precision parts in bomb manufacture. Meanwhile, Captain Karl Voss, already compromised by his unwitting role in the bombing of a Reichsminister's airplane, has been sent as military attache to the Lisbon legation. Like Andrea, Voss has been recruited to a cause: the assassination of Hitler on 20 July. When the two agents bump into each other, the chemistry is instantaneous. But the course of true love is disrupted by shifting loyalties, betrayals by higher-ups, the failure of the assassination attempt, and a massacre that spells the end of their lives in Portugal. This part of the story is a heartrending tale, unfolded with loving patience and rising tension. In the second, shorter part-which begins 24 years later with another round of deaths and Andrea's recruitment once more to the life she thought she'd left behind when she's sent to East Germany on a new mission for a new set of masters-Wilson overplays his hand, and the requisite plot twists upset the delicate balance of geopolitics and emotional intimacy. Even so, half of one of Wilson's loaves is more nourishing than most of his competition. (Kirkus Reviews)