Thursday 7 April 2011

Book Review: The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended to by a bodyguard of lies" ~ Sir Winston Churchill




When I accessed my blog today, I was shocked to see that the last post was more than a month ago. Time flies without the courtesy of a memo. And what have I been doing for the past one month? Well, I'm not going to bore you with the minute, mundane details of my life. Suffice to say, I was minding my own business, and perhaps a friend's or two's.....yes, I can be quite interested in my friends' lives, to put it mildly.  

Hang on....what has that got to do with a book review post? Nothing. I'm just rambling.

When I buy books, I tend to stick to authors I know. Reading can be a rather expensive hobby in Malaysia, if you are a voracious reader like me, so it makes sense to stick to what you know. However, when a book is given to you for free, you are less picky. And that was how I got my first chance to read Daniel Silva's works, a free Kindle ebook, courtesy of a friend S.

To be honest, The Unlikely Spy isn't his first book that I read. I read The Confessor, and liked it enough to take the trouble to google him and found that The Unlikely Spy was his first book, published in 1996, and which some of his fans think is still his best work yet.

While some of the characters and events are fictional, The Unlikely Spy is based on very real events during World War II. The very complex and detailed deception conjured up by the British Intelligence totally fascinated me. Imagine producing fake army tanks, fictitious army units, and so on. It's one big massive deception that rivals Hollywood blockbuster movies. 

The story was cinematic in its scope. I felt I was watching a Hollywood blockbuster instead of reading an ebook on the small Kindle screen. I was so involved in the story that I took the Kindle with me to the treadmill when it was time to work out at the gym. It's definitely a page-turner and if you would like to learn how the British fooled the Nazis and caused Hitler to make all the wrong decisions, pick up this book. The book is based on:-  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude