Roderick Bailey
Femme Fatale
The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, Britain’s First Female Special Agent of the Second World War
By Clare Mulley
Macmillan 426pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
In 1952, British newspapers reported the murder in a South Kensington hotel of a Polish-born woman called Christine Granville. Stabbed to death by a besotted ex-lover by the name of Dennis Muldowney, she had met him the previous year when both were working as cruise ship stewards. Before that she had been a waitress in a Polish café on the Brompton Road. And before that she had been one of the most remarkable secret agents of the Second World War, working covertly in two occupied countries and receiving an OBE, a George Medal and a French Croix de Guerre.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings
'Stevenson told W E Henley, the model for Long John Silver, it was "going to shoot up and become a star". Alas, it fizzled out like a cheap firework, as many of his projects had a tendency to do.'
Alan Taylor looks at the greatest novels never written.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-fight-to-finish