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The Best Book I Read Last Year
Read it before Hollywood makes it into a drab film.
“He told himself he had no choice, which is what we all tell ourselves when forced to make a terrible choice.”
Macintyre’s rip-roaring, unputdownable, edge-of-the-seat thriller reads like a Robert Ludlum novel.
The only difference: it’s all true.
Spycraft. Double Agents. Trenchcoats. Code names. The KGB. Subterfuge. Cold war. Globetrotting, whisky-guzzling, gadget-packing, sharp-suited posh folk engaging in deep espionage.
Think Bond and Bourne in a John le Carré universe tasked with diffusing the small matter of impending nuclear war.
If that doesn’t scream blockbuster, what does?
A lot of people find nonfiction boring. But Macintyre’s descriptive narrative style blurs the lines between the mundane and magical. A world-on-the-edge, bereft of trust. Polarised. Unrelenting. In constant churn. Heck, it could be today.
I won’t give away the plot — suffice to say it’s meatier than your last T-bone steak. You’ll recognise so many of the “characters” — Maggie Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, the secretive “C”, and a certain young KGB agent called Vladimir Putin.
