Tightrope

Spring 1945. Allied armies are closing on Berlin, and out of the ruins of Germany comes Marian Sutro, a woman who was last heard from by her British handlers in Paris in autumn 1943. She is one of the few Special Operations Executive agents still alive, and she has endured capture, questioning, imprisonment and the brutality of Ravensbrück. Back in an England that feels foreign and a postwar world she cannot make sense of, she looks for some stable footing. Her family and friends are close by, yet her memories and a painful sense of responsibility weigh on her. She believes her wartime work contributed to the later atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The enigmatic Major Fawley, the man who took over her mission in Paris, reappears and draws her into the murky world of the early Cold War, where loyalties are unclear and nothing is certain. Marian sees in this a chance to atone for what she has done and, at the same time, to discover a sense of self that has always eluded her.