Historical Fiction Annotation: Transcription by Kate Atkinson

 

Transcription

Author: Kate Atkinson

Genre: Historical Fiction/Mystery/Spy Thriller

Publication Date: September 6, 2018

Number of Pages: 343

Publisher: Little Brown and Company

Geographical Setting: London, England

Time Period: 1940s, 1950s, and 1981/WWII and post war era

Subject Headings: Spy, Espionage, MI5, Radio Producer, England, WWII, BBC

Summary: Miss Juliet Armstrong joins MI5 at the age of 18 during World War II. She has no family and she wants to help her country during war times. She gets recruited to be a typist for Perry, a boss in an undercover operation, at an apartment where they are trying to track the day to day lives of Nazi sympathizers. Juliet spends her days listening into conversations of Godfrey, a spy posing as a middleman for Hitler. Her boss Perry sees that she is quite good at lying by taking her on expeditions that no one but him would find fascinating. After a few of these daunting expeditions Perry enlists Juliet to be a spy. This allows her to infiltrate a group of sympathizers. All throughout this time she is still seen as a silly girl who happens to work for MI5. After the war she is let go and decides to work for the BBC. She moves to Manchester then back to London in the 1950s. 10 years after her time in MI5 her old life comes back to haunt her. She starts running into many of the people she had not talked to in years and starts to wonder if it is a coincidence. After all Perry always told her nothing was ever coincidence. Will this pull her back into MI5 or is there something dark lurking in the corners of her past? This book goes back and forth between Juliet at the BBC, her time at MI5, and 1981 when she is 60 years old.

Historical Fiction Elements:

Historical detail is throughout this novel. The setting, customs, culture, and more are all realistic when you dive into Juliet's life with MI5 and BBC. The dialogue, clothing, and characters make you feel like you have stepped back into 1940s and 1950s London. The way the author shapes the dialogue among the characters makes readers learn about the customs during war time and how different cultures can collide in the worst ways.

Fictional characters feel real. The way that the characters talk about their monarchy or how they talk about the Nazis make readers believe they are back in time. The MI5 agents and Nazi sympathizers were realistic in character and gave different takes on how people felt about WWII. The war time and London setting shapes Juliet's life and readers can imagine the book as a piece of nonfiction work based on the details that are put into shaping the characters.

Densely packed pages shape this novel. It is not huge like most historical fiction works but it does pack in quite a bit of information on each and every page. If one was to listen to the audiobook they would want to listen closely for all the details of the story. If one tries to read this book at more than a leisurely pace they may miss out on important details of the story unfolding.

3 Terms to Describe the Book:

• suspenseful
• character driven
• undercover 

Read-Alikes:

• The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck
• A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WWII’s Most Dangerous Spy by Sonia Purnell
• The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
• The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone
• Jackdaws by Ken Follett

References for the Historical Fiction Element Section:

Wyatt, N. & Saricks, J. (2019). The readers' advisory guide to genre fiction (3rd ed.). ALA Editions.