An Officer and a Spy Paperback - 2013

Media reviews

"Many readers prize him as our supreme exponent of the “literary” thriller. His novels are not difficult -- they are whizzing page-turners… They also combine 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… It offers a bravura display of Harris’s fictional skills. The first is sureness of historical touch. In both general and specific terms the period comes alive… There is no need to wait for the film: it can scarcely be more exciting than the book." --Sunday Times

"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

"The Dreyfus Affair… has now been brilliantly retold by Robert Harris… This is a book about spies and their deceits and the unreasonable demands that are made of them by their hard-to-please political governors. It is 1895 with a strong undercurrent of 2003… The real subject then is espionage and the broader, mutually manipulative relationship between the intelligence “community” and the political class… Along the way, Harris gives us plenty of espionage tradecraft. The eavesdropping, the handwriting analysis, the forgery." --The Times