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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Unusual, intriguing and hard to classify..., 11 Jun 2003
This is not my usual kind of book but it was passed on to me as part of a mixed bag when I was going on holiday, and to my surprise, I really enjoyed it. The blend of romance, human interest and espionage was just about right for someone who is not an avid reader of the spy genre. It was also one of the few loosely "romantic" books I can imagine recommending to a male reader.A message on an answerphone and a contact name on a memo lead Tessa to suspect that her scientist husband, Stephen, is having an affair. And why not, when her desire to have a baby has created such a huge rift between them? She decides to investigate and secretly follows him to Paris, where an American man takes a flattering interest in her. What she doesn't know is that for many years Stephen has acted as a courier for a network carrying scientific information across the Iron Curtain, run by Simone, an ageing and elegant French woman, who has secrets of her own. The action shifts to Eastern Europe, where Tessa falls in love with an abandoned baby and finds herself in unimaginable danger from her new admirer, Simone attempts to sort out the fallout from her wartime past, and Stephen begins to suspect that his own scientific work has been stolen. Stephen's old friend Jan, himself going through a separation, raises some interesting questions about how a marriage can be kept alive. By the end of the story, many things have been resolved. I really liked the style of this novel - neither twee and romantic nor off-puttingly terse and hard-bitten, it had a kind of clarity that I found very appropriate for a novel about academic thinkers. If Iris Murdoch, in her earlier and simpler style, had written a spy thriller, it might have read a bit like this. I look forward to reading more by this author!
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by Lisa Appignanesi
by Lisa Appignanesi
by Lisa Appignanesi
by Lisa Appignanesi
With an Amazon.co.uk Gift Certificate, you can get them what they want (even if you don't know what that is). 
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