Charity

Description

The final novel featuring Bernard Samson, one of Deighton's most enduring characters, who must return to Berlin for one last case Bernard Samson returns to Berlin in the final novel in the classic spy trilogy, FAITH, HOPE and CHARITY. Bernard continues to chip away at the mystery of his sister-in-law Tessa Kosinski's death in Berlin on the crucial night when his wife Fiona was brought out of the East. Fighting to uncover the truth, he must also confront the key relationships in his own life- Fiona is still far from stable now that she has returned to work, and their children remain in the clutches of his wealthy and manipulative father-in-law. Meanwhile, Werner Volkmann, Bernard's friend since childhood, is reluctant to get involved in Bernard's crusade. A wonderful depiction both of covert operations and office politics, Charity is packed with action, incident and intrigue, bringing to a triumphant conclusion a series of ten novels that represents one of the great achievements of modern English fiction.

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.

Here is the master of espionage writing at his brilliant best. * Mail on Sunday * Deighton's prose is tough, clean and compelling ... storytelling of this high quality will never go out of fashion. * Sunday Express * Like the vintage Bentley, Deighton's prose runs extremely smoothly. * Times Literary Supplement * 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 *