Exposure

“A spy novel but one that has been quietly and ingeniously deepened well beyond the ambitions of genre . . . [it] is one of those books that you read with your heart in your mouth, your mind fully engaged, and with a sense of desolation as you note the dwindling number of pages left before it comes to an end.”—Chicago Tribune

“Dunmore has always been fantastic on the complexity of people’s motivations and the secret reasons they act as they do. This book is no exception . . . a page turner...as much a surprising love story as it is a tale of spies.”—New York Times Book Review

It’s London, 1960. The Cold War is at its height, and a spy may be a friend or neighbor, colleague or lover. Two colleagues, Giles Holloway and Simon Callington, face a terrible dilemma over a missing top-secret file. At the end of a suburban garden, in the pouring rain, Simon’s wife, Lily, buries a briefcase containing the file deep in the earth. She believes that in doing so she is protecting her family. What she will learn is that no one is immune from betrayal or the devastating consequences of exposure. A master of the literary war novel as seen through the lens of individuals impacted by war’s effects, in Exposure, Helen Dunmore pulls back the veneer of 1960’s London life to reveal just how the betrayals and paranoia of the Cold War infiltrate even families. This is a propulsive novel of forbidden love and intimate deceptions from one of our finest writers.

“Dunmore's strategy, placing a triangle of past and present loves within a spy novel, yields an unexpected dividend...viscerally exciting.”—New Yorker

“Much like a slick, shape-shifting spook, Exposure is many things at once—an espionage thriller, a forbidden-love story, an immigrant’s tale—and it assumes these varied identities with confidence . . . a novel you won’t be able to shake.”—Entertainment Weekly