Downton Abbey meets The Imitation Game. When two vastly different young women make life-changing choices, it sets the scene for an unimaginable Allied disaster in WWII. Embittered by the government's seizure of her financially ruined father's estate, Lady Margaret Pugh is recruited as a spy by Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering during the 1936 Olympic Games. Four years later, Betty Hall, a working-class girl with a huge musical talent, temporarily turns her back on a glorious career opportunity in America to serve with the RAF as a Wireless Operator. All that changes when Margaret begins to unravel the secrets of Bletchley Park. Betty quickly finds herself thrust untrained into the deadly world of counter-espionage. And with the pair playing a critical game of cat and mouse, the fate of the Allies' most vital war secret soon hangs entirely on the outcome of their deeply personal conflict. But which one has really been the cat, and which one the mouse? 'I Spy Bletchley Park is a novel with a very different perspective of WW2 and one I would highly recommend.' Vicky-Leigh Sayer, Love Reading UK A WOMAN'S PLACE Of the ten thousand or so people who worked at Bletchley Park during WWII, nearly eight thousand of them were women. As both service personnel and civilians they played an indispensable role in every level of activity, right up to making vitally important cryptological breakthroughs of their own that were certainly on a par with those achieved by their more fabled male counterparts. But little is ever written about all those young women who fulfilled slightly less glamorous but still essential roles at the Park: women such as the Wren helping to operate huge cryptographic machinery, and the WAAF wireless or teleprinter operator working around the clock to send and receive encoded vital intelligence. There were also the translators and traffic analysts, usually working under intense pressure in dimly lit and poorly heated huts. These tasks, and many more besides, were all undertaken by women. Far from being just a small clique of intellects, Bletchley Park was a team of thousands. And 80 percent of them were female. Just for a change, I thought it would be rather nice if one of these less spoken about heroines were to take centre stage in a novel based around BP's secretive existence in the dark days of WWII. I hope you agree. George Stratford
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