Peter Hodgkinson – författare

In August 1941 George Orwell stopped writing his wartime diary and only resumed in March 1942. What might have happened in those six months?

Working for the BBC as a radio producer in the India Section of the Eastern Service,

Orwell was employed to produce British propaganda to subvert the growing demand for India''s Independence.

He learns of Churchill''s plan to partition India and meets Guy Burgess, later one of the Cambridge spies, who was also working at the BBC.

London was experiencing a welcome lull in the Blitz but the streets were still full of hidden dangers. One of Orwell''s young Indian assistants goes missing.

Inspector Charles Percy of Scotland Yard suspects Orwell is involved in her disappearance.

It was during this period that Orwell developed many of the ideas and themes that were later to be found in his famous novel 1984.

In 1947, Mary Deben travels to a remote cottage in Connemara, Ireland to write her ''Spanish novel''.

She recalls her recruitment in 1937 of Tom Lees, a young Irish writer, to be her ''eyes and ears'' on their journey to report on the Irish Blueshirts in the Spanish Civil War.

As she was prevented from going to the front, only Tom witnesses action with the calamitous Irish Brigade. Experiencing the horrifying menace of the fascists and the complicity of the Press on the Francoist-Nationalist side, Mary has to escape from Spain leaving Tom to an unknown fate.

Ten years later, in Connemara, Mary remains remorseful of having enlisted Tom. Unwittingly, she becomes involved in the child abuse scandal of the Industrial Schools. Recruiting a young Christian Brother, she gathers evidence of the abuse in a local school and learns of Tom''s fate.

A meeting with an extraordinary stranger also has unexpected consequences.