The story of one Allied air raid over twenty-four hours remains one of the finest British war novels
Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national
service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed
many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack
Kerouac's On the Road. The enormous success of his first spy novel,
The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of
books over the following decades. These varied from historical
fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian
alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction
books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears
and Folly).
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold
War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a
world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the
personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of
the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of
soil. Deighton's fascination with technology, his sense of humour
and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the
key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler,
Ian Fleming and John Le Carre.
Probably the best and certainly the most accurate popular novel
about the Second World War in the air.
*London Review of Books*
A massively different novel... the effect is - quite literally -
devastating.
*Sunday Times*
A massive and superbly mobilised tragedy of the machines which men
make to destroy themselves. Masterly and by far Mr Deighton's
best.
*The Spectator*
Bomber is probably the best thing ever written about the wartime
air campaign against Germany.
*The Times*
A magnificent story ... the characters lean out of the pages.
*Daily Mirror*
What raises Deighton's genre to art is not only his absorbing
characters but his metaphoric grace, droll wit, command of
technical detail ... and sure sense of place.
*Washington Post*
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