It's here! Browse the 2024 Penguin Christmas gift guide
Transcription

Transcription

Summary

The magnificent novel by bestselling and award-winning Kate Atkinson: 'A masterpiece' - Telegraph; 'Pageturner' - Evening Standard; 'Wise, funny and paced like a thriller' Observer

In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever.

Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.

Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of this country’s most exceptional writers.

'How vehemently most novelists will wish to produce a masterpiece as good' Telegraph
______________

Reviews

  • No other contemporary novelist has such supreme mastery of that sweet spot between high and low, literary and compulsively readable as Kate Atkinson. I look forward to a new Atkinson book like I look forward to Christmas…what lends the novel enchantment is that patented Atkinson double whammy: gravity and levity. Tragedy and comedy as so skilfully entwined that you find yourself snorting with mirth…brimming with dark wit that reminds you how deeply satisfying good fiction can be.
    Allison Pearson, Sunday Telegraph

About the author

Kate Atkinson

KATE ATKINSON is one of the world’s foremost novelists. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Life After Life, an acclaimed BBC TV series, won several prizes including the Costa Novel Award, as did A God in Ruins. Two further historical novels – Transcription and Shrines of Gaiety - were also Sunday Times bestsellers. She has published two critically acclaimed collections of short stories: Not the End of the World and Normal Rules Don’t Apply.

Her bestselling literary crime novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie, Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? and Started Early, Took My Dog, became a BBC television series starring Jason Isaacs. Jackson Brodie later returned in the novel Big Sky and the most recent, Death at the Sign of the Rook, was a number one bestseller.

Kate Atkinson was awarded an MBE in 2011 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

For information about Kate’s books, including her Jackson Brodie series, visit www.kateatkinson.co.uk
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more