BookTalk
Book Talk with Smiffs book & card store , Nerja
A Legacy Of Spies ( l ) returns to the characters of ‘ Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ’, John le Carré ’ s most famous espionage novels . Peter Guillam , staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the UK Secret Service has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old employer summons him to London . His Cold War past has come back to claim him . Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London are to be scrutinised by a generation with no memory of the Cold War . Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilled in the name of the greater good .
A Legacy Of Spies leads off this month ’ s Soltalk Hotlist of titles . Some are entirely new , others are moving into small paperback format for the first time or being reissued , sometimes after a long time out of print . All are due for publication on various dates this month and in early October . The Soltalk Hotlist helps readers to plan and budget for book ordering .
Staying in covert mood , Munich ( l ) is Robert Harris ’ spy thriller about treason and conscience , loyalty and betrayal , filled with real-life characters and actual events . Set over four days against the backdrop of the Munich Conference of September 1938 , the book follows the fortunes of two men who were friends at Oxford together in the 1920s . Hugh Legat is a rising star of the UK diplomatic service , serving as private secretary to the UK Prime Minister , Neville Chamberlain . Paul von Hartmann is on the staff of the German Foreign Office , and secretly a member of the anti- Hitler resistance .
Stieg Larsson ’ s Millennium series , which began with the global publishing phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo , has been continued by David Lagercrantz in The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye ( l ). Lisbeth Salander is not prone to forgiveness . She has been forged by a brutal childhood , horrific abuse , and repeated attempts on her life . Her dragon tattoo is a constant reminder of her pledge to fight against injustice . Confinement
to a secure unit in a women ’ s prison is intended as a punishment . Instead , Lisbeth finds herself in relative safety . Flodberga is a failing jail , effectively controlled by the inmates : for a computer hacker of her exceptional gifts there are no boundaries .
Other thrillers worth a look include : Robert B Parker ’ s Debt To Pay ( p ), a Jesse Stone novel by Reed Farrel Coleman ; The Seagull ( l ), a Vera Stanhope novel by Ann Cleeves ; Rhyming Rings ( p ), by David Gemmell ; The Saboteur ( l ), by Andrew Gross ; A Cold Case In Amsterdam Central ( p ), by Anja De Jager ; Thirst ( l ), by Jo Nesbø ; Haunted ( l ), by James Patterson ; and Secrets In Death ( l ), by JD Robb .
Among the romantic fiction titles is The Living Infinite ( l ), by Cuban-American Chantel Acevedo , a tale inspired by the true story of Spanish princess Eulalia , an outspoken firebrand at the Bourbon court during the troubled final years of her family reign . After her cloistered childhood , her youth spent in exile , and loveless marriage , she willingly accepts a role as royal emissary in the New World . She travels in the company of Thomas Aragon , the son of her former wet nurse and a small-town bookseller with a thirst for adventure , voyaging by ship to a Cuba bubbling with revolutionary fervour and then to the 1893 Chicago World Fair . As far as others are concerned , she is there as an emissary of the Bourbon dynasty and a guest of the Fair . Secretly , she is in America to find a publisher for her scandalous , incendiary autobiography , a book that might well turn the Old World order on its head .
In the history book Gibraltar ( l ), Roy and Lesley Adkins zone in on what they call ‘ The Greatest Siege in British History ’. This is an epic pageturner , rich in dramatic human detail : a tale of courage , endurance , intrigue , desperation , greed and humanity . The everyday experiences of all those involved are brought vividly to life with eyewitness accounts and expert research . For more than three and a half years , from 1779 to 1783 , the tiny territory of Gibraltar was besieged and blockaded , on land and at sea , by the overwhelming forces of Spain and France . It became the longest siege in UK history and was blamed there for the loss of the country ’ s American colonies in the War of Independence .
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