London Match

Description

Bernard Samson becomes a pawn in a game played by the Kremlin in the final instalment of the Game, Set and Match trilogy Long-suffering spy Bernard Samson has, against all the odds, enticed a Soviet agent to defect to London - but this proves to be the start of something even bigger. For he learns that there is treachery within his own Service, and no one is free from suspicion. To discover who really controls the game of spies, he must attempt a desperate gamble. As the Game, Set and Match trilogy reaches its shattering finale, who will make the winning move?

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.

Once again Deighton has woven an intricate and satisfying plot, peopled it with convincing characters and even managed to give a new twist or two to the spy story. But then he is a master of the form. * Washington Post * Len Deighton is the Flaubert of the contemporary thriller writers. -- Michael Howard * 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 * Len Deighton's spy novels are so good they make me sad the Cold War is over. -- Malcolm Gladwell The self-conscious cool of Deighton's writing has dated in the best way possible ... Stone-cold Cold War classic. -- Toby Litt * The Guardian *