A Classified Affair: A Novel

A marriage built on secrecy unravels when a British MI6 agent and “mole-hunter” disappears, leaving his estranged wife to wonder if he has vanished behind the Iron Curtain in pursuit of a traitor, or if he's the wanted man himself.

London, 1979. Even as Alice unlocks her front door, she is certain she's being watched—but whether by British intelligence, foreign agents, or someone closer to home she cannot say. Her husband, an MI6 agent, has been missing for weeks, but is it her infidelity that has driven him away—or something more sinister? He's long been tasked with investigating the Cambridge Five spy ring and rooting out its upper-crust members such as the infamous “Third Man,” Kim Philby, but Alice wonders if he is still hunting those elusive Cold War master spies, or if he himself is being hunted. And for what, exactly?

Over the course of forty-eight hours, Alice calls on old friends and enemies alike in an increasingly frantic search for any clue to her husband’s fate. Forced to reexamine every interaction, assignation, and scrap of gossip from her past, Alice is drawn deeper into a perilous world of surveillance, deceit, and clandestine dealmaking, where everyone—even she—has something to hide.

A sophisticated and deeply atmospheric game of cat-and-mouse told by a master storyteller, A Classified Affair explores the emotional stakes of a marriage built on lies, the social and sexual politics of an empire on the wane, and the inner life of a willful, wily operator no longer relegated to the sidelines of a man’s game.