Shake Off

Starred review from June 4, 2012
Set at the end of the cold war, Hiller’s beautifully written second novel (after 2010’s Sabra Zoo) chronicles the education of a spy. PLO agent Michel Khoury, who lives in a modest London bedsit but spent his first 15 years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, works for spymaster Abu Leila, who uses him mainly as a courier to shuttle documents from London to East Berlin and back. Now Leila wants his protégé to set up a meeting that will “change the course of history.” Meanwhile, Michel falls for his next-door neighbor, a playful young Englishwoman named Helen, despite a lifetime of keeping strict control over his emotions. Their romance causes increasing difficulties for Michel as he struggles to implement Leila’s instructions and stay true to his cause. A closing twist puts an entirely new perspective on Michel’s life, beliefs, and loyalties. Literary fiction fans will appreciate the sensitive, realistic portrayal of Michel and Helen’s love affair. Agent: David Grossman, David Grossman Literary Agency.

August 1, 2012
In Hiller's (Sabra Zoo, 2010) second thriller, Michel Khoury is a skilled linguist, a supposed student at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, and a PLO operative controlled by the mysterious Abu Leila. Khoury is a Lebanese Christian, a survivor of a horrific massacre in a Beirut refugee camp. Discovered by Leila, a PLO mastermind rumored to be connected to Arafat, Michel has been groomed since his orphaned teenage years for a purpose never revealed to him. He's learned multiple languages and was schooled in spy craft in Gorbachev's Moscow. Now, Abu Leila has assigned Michel to London, where he runs clandestine errands and acts as Leila's agent. With no other contact within the PLO, Khoury is confused but loyal when he is tasked to find a site for a meeting between Palestinians and Israelis who are working secretly for a single-state solution to Middle Eastern turmoil, a gathering sure to draw assassins from all quarters. In a life driven by deceit, Khoury's motives, decisions and reactions can be traced to the massacre that cost him his family. Khoury's initial human contact is the superbly written Abu Leila, but Hiller opens the narrative by introducing Helen, a beautiful and free-spirited English anthropology doctoral candidate. A romance begins, one filled with the same ambiguity that mirrors Michel's life as an operative. But then Michel's world is shattered when Abu is assassinated in Berlin shortly before the clandestine conference. That sends Khoury, accompanied by Helen, into the wilds of Scotland, pursued by Abu's killers. Moving from Lebanon to Cyprus to Berlin to Moscow and then to London, a city that Hiller knows and makes central to the story, the author writes believably of the world of undercover spies, both about the practicalities--picking locks, coding messages, using false identities--and the atmosphere of constant paranoia, continual double-dealing and amorality. An entertainingly complex, quick-moving psychological thriller.

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March 15, 2012

Having escaped from the exploding Middle East, Michel Khoury has become an intelligence operative with a desire for peace, a stash of passports and unmarked bills, and a new girlfriend who doesn't know his true identity. Soon, they're on the run. Half-Palestinian and half-British, Hiller has had great reviews from the UK and beyond for his first thriller (and second novel after the award-winning Sabra Zoo).

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2012
Michel Khoury is an intelligence agent for the PLO. Barely older than a typical university student, he lives like one in a modest London bedsit. He takes classes; serves as a courier for his control, Abu Leila; and carefully maintains rituals of tradecraft taught him in Moscow. He lives an almost monkish existence until he meets Helen, a graduate student. Their relationship awakens Michel to his profound loneliness; since his parents were murdered in a Lebanese refugee camp when he was 15, Leila, his mentor and surrogate father, has been, almost literally, his sole human contact. But when Leila is murdered, Michel and Helen are on the run, presumably from Mossad. Set in the 1980s, Shake Off is an arrestingly low-key espionage novel, as much about human longing as derring-do. There is more than enough tradecraft, suspense, and double-dealing to satisfy a wide range of espionage aficionados, but Shake Off has more in common with the writings of Graham Greene and John le Carre than those of Ian Fleming or Robert Ludlum.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)