Red Joan
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Inspired by the true story of a female spy, this is “an infectious page-turner, as crafty and nuanced and impassioned as any classic thriller” (The National).
Inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, unmasked as the KGB’s longest-serving British spy in 1999, at age eighty-seven, Red Joan centers on the deeply conflicted life of a young physicist during the Second World War.
Talented and impressionable, Cambridge undergraduate Joan Stanley befriends the worldly Sonya, whose daring history is at odds with Joan’s provincial upbringing. Joan also feels a growing attraction toward Leo, Sonya’s mysterious and charismatic cousin. Sonya and Leo, known communist sympathizers with ties to Russia and Germany, interpret wartime loyalty in ways Joan can only begin to fathom.
As nations throughout the continent fall to fascism, Joan is enlisted into an urgent project that will change the course of the war—and the world—forever. Risking both career and conscience, leaking information to the Soviets while struggling to maintain her own semblance of morality, Joan is caught at a crossroads in which all paths lead to the same endgame: the deployment of the atomic bomb.
Life during wartime, however, is often ambiguous, and when—decades later—MI5 agents appear at her doorstep, Joan must reaffirm the cost of the choices she made and face the cold truth: our deepest secrets have a way of dragging down those we love most.
The basis of the film starring Judi Dench and Sophie Cookson, this is “a brilliant spy novel, with [a] deft, involving plot . . . Tense, beautifully pitched, and very moving” (Marie Claire).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Desperate times call for desperate measures in Rooney's second novel (after Inside the Whale), a page-turning saga of spies, conflicted loyalty, and the grave consequences of good intentions, inspired by the true story of an Englishwoman, Melita Norwood, who was unmasked as a KGB spy in 1999 at age 87. When we first meet Joan Stanley, she is an elderly woman being visited by the British Security Service, who inform her she will be outed as a Soviet mole in the House of Commons in a few days' time. As she is interrogated, the questions prompt flashbacks to Joan's days at Cambridge in the late 1930s, where, as a physics student, she met the idealistic Leo Galich and his glamorous cousin Sonya, both communist sympathizers. The book shifts back and forth through time; as the MI5 interrogators press for a confession, Joan reminisces about falling in love with Leo, working at the Metals Research Facility, and learning coveted secrets about the making of the atomic bomb. She resists Leo's encouragement to betray her country until the Americans drop the bomb on Hiroshima, and only after she makes the fateful decision to become a Soviet spy does she grasp the true nature of her new masters. Rooney's prose is smooth and does not get in the way of her compelling, truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story.
