A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL

'The plotting is masterly, the atmospheric descriptions superb ... absolute bliss' Sunday Telegraph

Summer 1987, the final years of the Cold War. Bernard Samson has been sent to East Germany to make contact with a KGB defector, codename VERDI, who claims to have access to top intelligence secrets. But something goes wrong, and Bernard must struggle to stay in the game. Fighting to keep his job and rebuild his shattered marriage, kept in the dark by London Central, he has no one he can trust, and nothing to depend on but his own faith. This is the first part of the 'Faith, Hope and Charity' trilogy.

'A string of brilliantly mounted set-pieces ... superbly laconic wisecracks' The Times

About the Author

Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly).

His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.

Reviews
Like lying back in a hot bath with a large malt whisky - absolute bliss ... The plotting in Faith is masterly, the atmospheric descriptions superb. * Sunday Telegraph *
A string of brilliantly mounted set-pieces ... superbly laconic wisecracks. * The Times *
Deighton's outstanding achievement is the nine-volume series chronicling the life and times of Bernard Samson ... Deighton's Samson trilogies are as much about the elusiveness of human interactions as espionage. Spying is not a secret world sealed off from ordinary life but an extension of the world we all live in. -- John Gray * New Statesman *
The self-conscious cool of Deighton's writing has dated in the best way possible; bear in mind that the man was almost single-handedly responsible for brinfging coffee culture to the British Isles. Stone-cold Cold War classic. -- Toby Litt * The Guardian *



Book Information
ISBN 9780241505366
Author Len Deighton
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 236g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 18mm