What would you do if someone you knew your entire life — your mother — suddenly revealed that she’d been a spy?
Deborah Lawrenson turned her story into a novel.
The tangled web of espionage she weaves in The Secretary is fiction, but the background to the story is authentic, drawn in part from a seemingly innocent diary her mother wrote in 1958 while working at the British Embassy in Moscow.
It’s an exciting high stakes thriller with insightful social commentary and a vivid sense of place. Exactly the sort of novel she excels at.
Deborah is the author of Songs of Blue and Gold, The Lantern, 300 Days of Sun, The Secretary and other novels. She trained as a journalist on the Kentish Times and worked for The Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Woman’s Journal before becoming a full time novelist.
You can read more about her on her website, and follow her on Instagram, Facebook and X.
We spoke about Cold War Moscow, growing up as an embassy child, and the shock of discovering her mother’s cloak-and-dagger past.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
The Billion Dollar Spy by David Hoffman
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