WINNER OF THE LANNAN LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION - From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea comes the fascinating story of a former British spy who's been unmasked as a Russian agent--and 'one of spy fiction's greatest characters' (People). - 'Contemporary fiction gets no better than this.' --The New York Times Book Review One of the most dazzling and adventurous writers now working in English takes on the enigma of the Cambridge spies in a novel of exquisite menace, biting social comedy, and vertiginous moral complexity. The narrator is the elderly Victor Maskell, formerly of British intelligence, for many years art expert to the Queen. Now he has been unmasked as a Russian agent and subjected to a disgrace that is almost a kind of death. But at whose instigation? As Maskell retraces his tortuous path from his recruitment at Cambridge to the airless upper regions of the establishment, we discover a figure of manifold doubleness: Irishman and Englishman; husband, father, and