A young sub-editor in Soho is asked to "assist, not thwart" when a woman from East Berlin finds him in a crowded pub and a revered German scholar surfaces in Cambridge cloisters. One death, one arrest, and a cache of index cards pull him from proofs and page plans into interview rooms, safe houses, and High Table dinners, where a porter's raised eyebrow, a brand of cigar, or a borrowed red coat can mean more than a signed confession.
Set between smoke-hazed London pubs, panelled college rooms, and the damp lawns of the Fens, The Parallax View is an understated, character-driven spy novel about trust and its counterfeits: love and duty, surveillance and intimacy, the stories we file and the ones we misplace. Archives become weapons; language becomes cover; identities shift by degrees until they no longer look the same.
Written in crystalline British English, it favours quiet jeopardy over gunfire, moral tension over theatrics. The atmosphere is taut, elegant, and humane; the emotions are earned.
As loyalties tilt and the past presses against the present, one question remains: when every angle offers a different truth, who do you dare believe?
The third novel in The Thieves of Time, a sequence exploring art, secrecy, identity, and the shadows cast by desire and intelligence work.
