Horse Under Water

Lively, exciting, ingenious. * Observer * Len Deighton's spy novels are so good they make me sad the Cold War is over. -- Malcolm Gladwell 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. -- Andy Solomon * Washington Post * Deighton's fiction has stood the test of time. His habitually acerbic narrative voice still has much to say to contemporary readers ... Now a fresh generation have the chance to sample Deighton's wares as Penguin republishes many of his books. -- Vanessa Thorpe * The Observer * Mr Deighton is really something special. * Sunday Times * For sheer readability he has no peer. * Evening Standard * Fleming made spy fiction globally popular, but it took Deighton in the Sixties to make it hip. * The Telegraph * With this, his second bestseller in as many years, Len Deighton really hit his stride. Multiple deceits defy a full plot summary. Suffice to say that with a succession of startling revelations linked by sharp dialogue, the book effortlessly acquires classic status. -- Barry Turner * Daily Mail *

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 Carr.