TRANSCRIPTION- SEPTEMBER 2022 BOOK SELECTION

Kate Atkinson is the master of this genre. Juliet Armstrong, only eighteen, is recruited in 1940 during WWII to work for MI5. Atkinson creates with skill the thoughts and actions of an extremely shallow and naïve Juliet as she tries to find her way alone in London after the death of her mother.

What at first seems very routine, even boring work, becomes much more. Her job is to listen as an established MI5 agent recruits and conducts meetings with British collaborators of the Third Reich and Hitler. Juliet’s job is to secretly listen and transcribe into minutes the contents of those meetings. The clandestine meetings take place in an apartment owned by MI5 which is next door to the meetings.

Soon she is tapped to assume a new identity and infiltrate the fascist sympathizers. The real danger is to be discovered by the collaborators.

Interspersed with these war recollections we find Juliet postwar, ten years later, working for the BBC and occasionally operating a safe-house for MI5. At this point she is surprisingly world-weary, laconic and jaded.

Juliet begins to see several figures from her past. One central one refuses to acknowledge her. Suspicious and fearful, she attempts to investigate and finds she cannot escape the past. Surprise ending.