I thought that it was interesting that for a novel set in World War Two, that the most powerful weapons for Juliet and her colleagues are words. This group is completely taken in by Godfrey, and believe that he has direct links to Nazi Germany, and that they will be rewarded for their efforts to thwart Britain’s war effort. Her job is transcribe the conversations between a group of people called The Fifth Columnists and an agent called Godfrey Toby, who is pretending to be a Gestapo Agent, and is trying to see what intelligence they have. She is selected from her routine governmental role and is recruited by MI5 to work for them. We meet Juliet Armstrong as an eighteen year old living in London.

Once you read the opening page, it is simply impossible to put down. The thing that no one is saying openly about Transcription is this. I was delighted to finally receive my copy and decided to flick through a few pages just to get a feel for it. I knew I wanted to read it having heard so many things about it, and there was a huge publicity buzz on Twitter and Instagram. Transcription was being hailed as extraordinary long before its publication date on September 6th last week. The publication of a Kate Atkinson novel is always a huge event in the Book World. She was the apple ripe for plucking and she also had been Eve willing to eat the apple.” “She believed that England could be a better country. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of this country’s most exceptional writers. Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage.

Transcription by kate atkinson review