Goodbye Mickey Mouse

Description

A meticulously detailed and moving novel explores the lives of American fighter pilots in World War Two Goodbye Mickey Mouse is a vivid evocation of wartime England, the story of a group of American fighter pilots flying escort missions over Germany in the winter of 1943-4. At the centre of the novel are two young men- the deeply reserved Captain Jamie Farebrother, estranged son of a deskbound colonel, and the cocky Lieutenant Mickey Morse, well on his way to becoming America's Number One Flying Ace. Alike only in their courage, they forge a bond of friendship in battle with far-reaching consequences for themselves, and for the future of those they love.

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.

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 *