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Author: Wilson, Edward

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 4 August 2022 by Quercus Publishing (MacLehose Press) in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the William Catesby’ series.

Paperback | 304 pages
131 x 197 x 26 | 222g

A brilliant Cuban Missile Crisis spy thriller by a former special forces officer who is ‘poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carré’ ‘Edward Wilson seems poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carré’ Irish Independent’More George Smiley than James Bond, Catesby will delight those readers

looking for less blood and more intelligence in their spy thrillers’ Publishers WeeklyOctober, 1962. If the Cuban gamble goes wrong and war breaks out, Britain will cease to exist.

Whitehall dispatches a secret envoy to defuse the confrontation. Spawned in the bleak poverty of an East Anglian fishing port, Catesby is a spy with an anti-establishment chip on his shoulder. He loves his country, but despises the class who run it.

Though he is loathed by the Americans for his left-wing sympathies, Catesby is sent to Havana and Washington to make clandestine contacts. London has authorised Catesby to offer Moscow a secret deal to break the deadlock.

But before it can be sealed, he meets the Midnight Swimmer, who has a chilling message for Washington.

‘An intellectually commanding thriller’ Independent’An excellent spy novel . . . belongs on the bookshelf alongside similarly

unsettling works by le Carré, Alan Furst and Eric Ambler’ Huffington PostPraise for Edward Wilson: ‘Stylistically sophisticated . . . Wilson knows how to hold the reader’s attention’ W.G. Sebald’A reader is really privileged to come across something like this’ Alan Sillitoe’All too often, amid the glitzy gadgetry of the spy thriller, all the

fast cars and sexual adventures, we lose sight of the essential

seriousness of what is at stake. John le Carré reminds us, often, and so does Edward Wilson’ Independent