Sarah A Smith
Someone to Watch Over Me
The Long Room
By Francesca Kay
Faber & Faber 291pp £14.99 order from our bookshop
Exposure
By Helen Dunmore
Hutchinson 391pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Spy novels have a tendency to include the same ingredients: a miserable childhood, an Oxbridge education, an unhappy love affair, alcoholism, perhaps a touch of obsession. Francesca Kay’s The Long Room and Helen Dunmore’s Exposure both conform to type, and are none the worse for that. Yet while Kay demonstrates that convention is no bar to invention, Dunmore sticks close to the accepted formula.
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