The Unfortunate Englishman

By John Lawton

Book Overview

Berlin, 1963. East End-Londoner turned spy Joe Wilderness has had better days. He is sitting in a West Berlin jail, arrested for shooting someone he thought was about to kill him. His old boss, Lieutenant Burne-Jones of MI6, comes to Berlin to free him, but only under the condition that he rejoin British Intelligence. The knowledge that Wilderness gained of Berlin's underworld while working the black market just after World War II will prove useful to Queen and country now that the city has become the epicenter of the Cold War, dividing the world in two with its wall.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, another MI6 man, Geoffrey Masefield, is ruing the day he first agreed to be a spy. In the beginning, it had all seemed so simple, so glamorous: the international travel, the top secret files, the vodka, the women. . . . But now Masefield is stuck in Lubyanka, the KGB's Moscow prison, waiting for a lifeline from his former employer. Meanwhile, over in England, a Russian spy is pining for his homeland. Having lived as Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn for years and taken a wife and had two daughters under that alias, he's now been exposed as KGB Captain Leonid Liubimov. Arrested for treason and then for espionage, he is in prison at Wormwood Scrubs, London. The only ticket out for these two men is a spy exchange.

Posted back to Berlin, Wilderness is to oversee the exchange of Masefield and Liubimov, but his black market nous hasn't diminished. There's money to be made and ten thousand bottles of fine Bordeaux that Wilderness hasn't forgotten about. A brilliantly evocative novel from a writer regularly compared to John le Carr , The Unfortunate Englishman is a gripping tale of Cold War espionage, and the best laid plans of unfortunate men.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802126359
• ISBN13: 9780802126351
• Release Date: March 2017
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

A Cracking Good Yarn!!!

I read the first of this series nearly a year ago and just finished The Unfortunate Englishman. My only wish is that I'd have read the one right after the other as it still would've been fresh in memory. Still, there was enough for me to piece together. This went on a little slower than Then We Take Berlin, which I couldn't put down. Both books weave the History with the novel, but the second of the series was infinitely more humorous, to laugh out loud every few pages of a spy novel is quite rare but Mr. Lawton pulls it off. Like 'Orla' of the Derry Girls series, "Cracking" is my new word of choice.