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“Robert
Harris, in his fine novel, An Officer and
a Spy, lucidly retells the famous, bizarrely complicated and chilling
story.”
— New York Times Book Review
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Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
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British National Book Awards—Popular Fiction Book of the Year
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Outstanding . . . Finds its chilling thrills in the unlikeliest of places.
— USA Today
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[A] superb historical thriller. . . . Thick with scenes of code-breaking, covert surveillance, hairsbreadth escapes and violent death.
— The Wall Street Journal
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Harris has, with this novel, taken [Le Carré’s] place as the master of making documents and scraps of paper, the details of painstaking intelligence work, into drama.
— The Daily Beast
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[Harris] outdoes himself. The period details are pitch-perfect . . . and the action pulses with intensity.
— The Miami Herald
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A gripping tale.
— The New York Times
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Mesmerizing. . . . The Dreyfus affair remains astonishing, and this exceptional piece of popular fiction does it justice.
— The Washington Post
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A thrilling page-turner. . . . Thick with espionage, daring and cruel turns of fate.
— New York Daily News
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A crisp, fast-paced drama. . . . From one of the great scandals of the late 19th century, Harris has written a novel which is true to the facts, scrupulously so, but reads like a combination of Le Carré at his best and Conan Doyle writing about Sherlock Holmes.
— The Daily Beast
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Robert Harris’s novel speaks to our times in its examination of the potential dangers of military intelligence.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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A compelling narrative of state corruption. . . . While finely attuned to modern resonances of surveillance, cultural identity and patriotic loyalty, Harris stays true to the atmosphere and morals of the period.
— The Guardian (UK)
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A master storyteller at the top of his game. . . . The echoes of our own time are deafening. But Harris is far too smart to labor the point. He just drives his story forward, marshalling his cast of fools and knaves, soldiers and spies, dodgy handwriting experts and discreet mistresses, to superlative effect.
— Mail on Sunday (UK)
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Claustrophobically gripping. . . . Written in elegant prose reminiscent of the 19th-century historical novel, but its form is a hybrid of the contemporary thriller, the spy novella and the courtroom drama. It is persuasive and engaging on all of these levels, while providing a unique and fresh reading of the Dreyfus affair.
— The Irish Times
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Instantly absorbing. . . . Great for fans of Ken Follett, John le Carré, Louis Bayard, Caleb Carr, and Martin Cruz Smith.
— Booklist (starred review)
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Easily the best fictional treatment of the Dreyfus Affair. . . . Harris perfectly captures the rampant anti-Semitism that led to Dreyfus’s scapegoating.
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Espionage, counterespionage, a scandalous trial, a cover-up, and a man who tries to do right make this a complex and alluring thriller.
— Kirkus Reviews
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“Many readers prize him as our supreme exponent of the ‘literary’ thriller. His novels are…whizzing
page-turners…masterly suspense and mystery with
historical insight and political shrewdness. His latest novel is no
exception: it is a cracking read from start to finish…There is no need to wait for the film: it can scarcely be more
exciting than the book.”
— Sunday Times (London)
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“Harris is committed to the belief that you can get at a truth as a
novelist that you can’t as an historian…and he does give us the look,
sensations, sounds and smells as no historian could…It is informative,
accomplished, and highly enjoyable.”
— Evening Standard (London)
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“The best fictional treatment of the Dreyfus Affair yet…[A] gripping thriller…Harris perfectly captures the rampant anti-Semitism that led to Dreyfus’s scapegoating, and effectively uses the present tense to lend intimacy to the narrative.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“This is an atmospheric and tense historical thriller, with a flawed but honorable protagonist fighting against entrenched complacence and bigotry.”
— Library Journal
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“Espionage, counterespionage, a scandalous trial, a cover-up, and a man who tries to do right make this a complex and alluring thriller.”
— Kirkus Reviews