Books like William Boyd

Atkinson gives you another apparently unremarkable Englishwoman whose identity was shaped by wartime intelligence work—but the real kinship lies in her combination of brisk suspense, dry comedy and slowly accumulating moral unease. In 1940, teenage Juliet Armstrong is recruited to monitor British fascist sympathizers; a decade later, working at the BBC, she finds that the past has not finished with her.

Like Boyd, Atkinson is fascinated by the way impersonation seeps into ordinary life. Juliet’s alert, sardonic consciousness makes the novel wonderfully readable, while every seemingly casual detail carries a latent charge. Transcription is not simply a polished spy story: it is a sly novel about complicity, storytelling and the national talent for disguising violence as good manners.

Exposure relocates the pressure of secret service work into a marriage. When Admiralty employee Simon Callington is asked by an old friend to deal with a classified file, the consequences begin to spread toward his wife, Lily, a German-Jewish refugee who has worked hard to make an English home for their family.

Dunmore understands, as Boyd does, that espionage becomes most powerful on the page when public danger invades kitchens, bedrooms and family loyalties. Her lucid, sensuous prose makes fear physical—the cold, the darkness, the objects people touch while deciding whether to lie. Written by an Orange Prize-winning novelist and accomplished poet, Exposure has the tautness of a thriller but the emotional authority of a first-rate marriage novel.

Edward Feathers, a formidable retired judge known as Old Filth, appears to have led a life of polished imperial success. Gardam gradually opens that public identity to reveal the displaced child, private injuries and acts of self-invention beneath it. The result is less a sequence of disclosures than the astonishing recovery of an entire hidden person.

Readers who loved the movement between Ruth’s present and Eva’s buried history will recognize Gardam’s gift for making chronology itself suspenseful. Yet Old Filth is warmer, stranger and often funnier than its melancholy premises suggest. Widely regarded as Gardam’s masterpiece and the beginning of a deeply admired trilogy, it proves that the secrets of one outwardly composed life can carry the sweep of twentieth-century history.