The Company of Strangers (Paperback)

'Displaying once again Wilson's gifts for atmospheric depiction of place, this ambitious experiment is streets ahead of most other thrillers' John Dugdale, Sunday Times 'With Company of Strangers Wilson again shows himself to be one of our finest writers and a storyteller with few equals' Jim Driver, Time Out 'Wilson employs a slightly out-of-focus prose style that eminently suits his tale of intrigue and double-dealing ... watch his star, for it is surely in the ascendent' Vincent Banville, Irish Times 'Wilson's tale is a plotter's delight: spanning several decades and cleverly reworking past narratives in the light of new evidence, he creates an intriguing moral maze for his heroine to negotiate - and a puzzle of metaphors to match (he's a better stylist than du Maurier). Recommended' Chris Petit, Guardian 'A big, meaty novel of love and deceit ... with this novel Wilson vaults to the front-rank of thriller writers' Peter Guttridge, Observer

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)

Lisbon 1944. Andrea Aspinall, mathematician and spy, and Karl Voss, military attache to the German Legation, to find love in a world where no-one can be believed. After a night of terrible violence, Andrea is left with a secret which precipitates life-long addiction to the clandestine world.