XPD

Description

Alternate history meets Cold War thriller in a vintage Len Deighton escapade 11 June, 1940 - where is Winston Churchill? A private aircraft takes off from a small town in central France, while Adolf Hitler, the would-be conqueror of Europe, prepares for a clandestine meeting near the Belgian border. For more than forty years the events of this day have been Britain's most closely guarded secret. Anyone who learns of them must die - with their file stamped- XPD - expedient demise.

Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following decades. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly). His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.

A stunning spy story ... Deighton remains the incomparable entertainer. * The Guardian * Exciting and well made. * Daily Telegraph * Deliciously sharp and flawlessly accurate dialogue, breathtakingly clever plotting, confident character drawing ... a splendidly strongly told story. * The Times * The poet of the spy story. * Sunday Times *