'The sheer charge of the writing swept me into another world' The Times

December 1943. A group of US fighter pilots is camped at a windswept air base in Norfolk. Their job is to escort bombers over Germany, and each mission could be their last. Among them are cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse (nicknamed 'Mickey Mouse'), who is almost on his way to becoming a Flying Ace, and reserved Captain Jamie Farebrother, who is starting to fall in love with an English woman. All they have in common is their courage - until the day their lives converge in ways they could never have imagined.

'Truly astonishing in its recreation of a time and place ... it is a novel of memory, satisfying on every imaginable level' Washington Post

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
It is a novel of memory, satisfying on every imaginable level, but truly astonishing in its recreation of a time and place through minute detail ... The only way you could know more about flying a P-51 Mustang, after reading this book, is to have flown one. * Washington Post *
He writes, as usual, with authority and a superb sense of period. * Daily Telegraph *
The sheer charge of the writing swept me into another world all the while I was reading, and now that piece of the past is a piece in my mind. -- HRF Keating * The Times *



Book Information
ISBN 9780241505397
Author Len Deighton
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 281g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 21mm