Our Game

At forty-eight, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in premature retirement in deepest Somerset. His Cold War is fought and won, and he is free to devote himself to his stately manor house, his vineyard and his beautiful young mistress, Emma. But no man can escape his past, and Tim’s past lives twenty miles away, in the chaotic person of Larry Pettifer, bored radical don, philanderer and, for twenty years, Tim’s mercurial double agent against the now vanished Communist threat. And between the two men stands Emma, and an unresolved rivalry that dates all the way back to their shared boyhood at public school.

Larry disappears. So does Emma. In his pursuit of them, Tim himself becomes the quarry, raiding his own past like a thief as he follows the lovers into the moral minefield of their new allegiance. But as Tim advances into the lawless wilds of Moscow and then Southern Russia, we share with him also the dilemma of a dispossessed loyalist of our time, grappling with his left-over humanity.

Our Game is a novel of suspense in the great British tradition: now romantic, now tragic, now comic, gripping to the last page and always vastly entertaining. Yet, even more than that, it is a novel suffused with magic. The magic is to be found in the unremitting tension that electrifies the story from the first word, in the authority and skill of the narrator’s voice and in the dazzling finale in which a small, unheard-of nation becomes a natural proving-ground of two lost souls.