Stephen Hayes reviewed Transcription by Kate Atkinson
None
4 stars
Juliet Anderson has to leave school when her mother dies at the beginning of the Second World War and is recruited by MI5, initially to transcribe recordings of conversations of British Nazi sympathisers, and later to join them as a spy herself.
After the war she joins the BBC, producing children's programmes, but people from her past keep popping up with threats and demands.
The story keeps jumping backwards and forwards in time sometimes in a rather confusing way, so that one reads about the consequences of an event before reading about the event itself, and at times that made me go back looking through pages I had already read to find out what had happened, only to find that it was some pages further on in the story. I thought this was rather unfair on the reader, and it was the reason for giving it four, rather than five …
Juliet Anderson has to leave school when her mother dies at the beginning of the Second World War and is recruited by MI5, initially to transcribe recordings of conversations of British Nazi sympathisers, and later to join them as a spy herself.
After the war she joins the BBC, producing children's programmes, but people from her past keep popping up with threats and demands.
The story keeps jumping backwards and forwards in time sometimes in a rather confusing way, so that one reads about the consequences of an event before reading about the event itself, and at times that made me go back looking through pages I had already read to find out what had happened, only to find that it was some pages further on in the story. I thought this was rather unfair on the reader, and it was the reason for giving it four, rather than five stars.