City of Gold

Description

The race is on to find a German agent, hiding somewhere in the maze of wartime Cairo January 1942. Rommel's seemingly invincible Afrika Korps is at the gates of Egypt - perhaps soon to threaten Cairo itself. And Rommel has a spy in the city - a source so well-informed that the German commander knows in advance every movement of the allied forces. Amongst the teeming streets and bazaars, the British, led by Major Albert Cutler, must find him. But Cairo is a city of fool's gold, where nothing and nobody, not even Cutler, can be taken at face value...

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.

A superb example of Deighton's craft. -- Robert Harris * Sunday Times * The pace of the story is compulsive ... it is a real pleasure to be swallowed up in Deighton's description of wartime Cairo. * Daily Telegraph * The hallmarks of a Deighton novel are an intricate plot, an easy grasp of detail and a total mastery of storytelling technique. * Sunday Times * A master of fictional espionage. * Daily Mail *