A Classified Affair

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Alice's spymaster husband is missing. As the Cold War draws terrifyingly close to home, is it his work keeping him away, an infidelity – or something far more sinister?

Alice has accepted absence and silence as necessary features of her decades-long marriage to a senior MI6 agent. After all, she has secrets of her own. But now, in the winter of 1979, with the Fourth Man in the Cambridge Spy Ring just exposed, there is talk of a Fifth – and Alice starts to wonder if she really knows the seemingly impeccable man she married.

Returning to their locked-up London terrace, her past is bearing down on her, and she calls on old friends and enemies in search of some clue to his whereabouts. But in this closed world of power and privilege, is anyone really who they seem to be? Is she?

As her husband’s secrets pull him further away, it becomes apparent that Alice is being watched. Is it by British intelligence, foreign agents, or someone closer to home? And what does this faceless enemy want with the spymaster’s wife?

About Chloe Hooper

CHLOE HOOPER’s first novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She has written lauded nonfiction about Australia, including The Tall Man, which follows the investigation of an Aboriginal man’s death in custody, and The Arsonist, the investigation of a deliberately lit wildfire. Most recently, she has co-authored, with Helen Garner and Sarah Krasnostein, The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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