Exposure

February 1, 2016
Dunmore’s (The Lie) novel of Cold War domestic intrigue depicts secrets, lies, treachery, and murder amid the seemingly safe surroundings of 1960s England. Facades begin crumbling and cover stories unravel when Admiralty member and master of concealment Giles Holloway drunkenly falls in his apartment while photographing a top secret file. From his hospital bed, with a leg in a cast and an arm hooked to transfusion tubes, Giles calls his colleague and longtime friend Simon Callington and asks him to return the file to the office before its absence becomes known. Giles believes Simon will comply because Simon owes Giles his job, and because Giles has something on Simon: they were once lovers. Now a husband with three children, Simon agrees to do Giles’s bidding until he realizes Giles is spying for the Russians, almost certainly not alone. Simon places the file in Giles’s briefcase and hides it; his wife, Lily, soon discovers it in their hallway closet behind the Wellington boots. Born Jewish in Nazi Germany, Lily knows how to handle herself under duress. As Simon is wrongly imprisoned for espionage, she buries the briefcase, relocates the family to Kent, and navigates her way through false accusations and unsettling truths. Dunmore deftly creates a noir atmosphere, revealing layers of complexity in personal relationships darkened by non-battlefield conflict and blending psychological observations reminiscent of Henry James with le Carré–esque betrayals.

Starred review from February 1, 2016
Prolific British author Dunmore, who has published poetry, children's literature, and a range of adult fiction (The Lie, 2014, etc.), shifts gears yet again with this Cold War-era spy drama. Drama as opposed to mystery because there is no question about who's passing secrets. Readers know early on that Giles Holloway and his spymaster, Julian Clowde, are moles in the British Admiralty, where Julian holds a high position. This is 1960, the defection of actual spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean is public knowledge, and Giles senses he's being watched. One night after photographing a file for Julian in his secret attic office, Giles falls down his stairs in a fluke accident that leaves him seriously injured. Since Julian is unavailable in Venice, Giles calls co-worker Simon Callington from his hospital bed to ask a favor: get the file and return it to Julian's desk. But Simon is clearly no spy, merely a middling civil servant without ambition. After an unhappy childhood being bullied by his brothers, all Simon cares about is the haven of normalcy he has created with his children and wife, Lily, a Jew who escaped Germany in 1937 and remains fearfully conscious of her outsider status in England. But out of lingering affection and guilt--before meeting Lily, while still a student at Cambridge, he broke off an intense love affair with Giles--Simon agrees to retrieve the file against his better judgment. When he sees the designation "Top Secret," Simon realizes that Giles lacked authorization to read the file, let alone bring it home, and was probably spying. Afraid that returning it will place Simon himself under suspicion, he brings the file home, where Lily finds it and does whatever she considers necessary to save her family. This subtle, off-kilter foray into John le Carre territory--a chilling, thoughtful, deeply romantic drama about the collateral damage suffered by those on the periphery of world events--displays Dunmore's gifts as one of today's most elegant and versatile storytellers.

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Starred review from April 1, 2016

Simon Callington--an officer safely entrenched in the middle of the British Admiralty--is estranged from his aristocratic family and has a German Jewish wife, with whom he has three children, at least one of whom is a nerdy trainspotter. It being 1960, then, there's something decidedly off about our Simon. When a higher government official (and Simon's lover when they were both at Cambridge) becomes incapacitated and needs to cover up the presence of a classified document in his flat, he summons Simon to do the dirty deed. Simon accedes, and that small gesture begins the unraveling of his and his family's lives amid charges of Soviet treachery splashed across the front pages of the tabloids. Beneath the framework of this spy thriller is a keenly observed and etched portrait of a marriage and a society too buttoned up for their own good. Clearly no James Bond and less adept than George Smiley, simple Simon and his faithful and quite resourceful wife, who is a more than equal partner, manage to exist in pressure-cooker Britain where everything from the buildings, atmosphere, and clothes to the faces are as gray as the kidney served up at tea. VERDICT One measure of the novel's success is that, by its conclusion, the reader is left gasping for a breath of fresh air.--Bob Lunn, Kansas City, MO

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2016
Dunmore's latest historical novel may look like a classic espionage tale, but, in fact, it uses the Cold War landscape to tell a broader story about a woman's courage and a family in crisis. When Simon Callington, a mid-level bureaucrat working for Naval Intelligence, is summoned by his mentor, Giles Holloway, in hospital after a drunken fall, to retrieve a top-secret file from his flat, the nightmare begins. Soon Simon has been arrested as a spy, and his wife, Lily, a German Jew who escaped the Nazis, finds herself and her two children sucked into the scandal. She loses her teaching job and is forced to move with the children from London to a dreary cottage on the wrong side of Kentstoking an inadequate coal furnace, scrabbling for food, despairing over the fate of her husband. Remembering her experiences in Germany, she realizes again what she has always known: The world has battering rams, if it chooses to use them. Yes, spies provide the frame story, but Dunmore's focus is on how her characters must confront the past: Lily dealing with those ubiquitous battering rams, Simon coming to terms with the affair he had at Cambridge with Giles, and Gilesperhaps the most arresting figure in a cast rich with multifaceted charactersabsorbing the full weight of a lifetime of betrayal, even in the face of love. Readers who pick up this novel looking for cloak-and-dagger suspense may be disappointed, but those open to a slower-paced investigation of human relationships will find traces of Margaret Drabble and even E. M. Forster, whose famous dictum, only connect, echoes across every page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)