Red Joan, Jennie Rooney
Red Joan, Jennie Rooney
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $12.99

Red Joan

Author: Jennie Rooney

Narrator: Jenny Sterlin

Unabridged: 13 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 03/23/2018


Synopsis

Inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, a woman unmasked in 1999, at age 87, as the KGB's longest-serving British spy, Red Joan centers on the deeply conflicted life of a brilliant young physicist during the Second World War. Talented and impressionable, Cambridge undergraduate Joan Stanley befriends the worldly Sonya, whose daring history is at odds with Joan's provincial upbringing. Joan also feels a growing attraction toward Leo, Sonya's mysterious and charismatic cousin. Sonya and Leo, known communist sympathizers with ties to Russia and Germany, interpret wartime loyalty in ways Joan can only begin to fathom. As nations throughout the continent fall to fascism, Joan is enlisted into an urgent project that will change the course of the war-and the world-forever. Risking both career and conscience, leaking information to the Soviets, but struggling to maintain her own semblance of morality, Joan is caught at a crossroads in which all paths lead to the same end-game: the deployment of the atomic bomb. Life during wartime, however, is often ambiguous, and when-decades later-MI5 agents appear at her doorstep, Joan must reaffirm the cost of the choices she made and face the cold truth: our deepest secrets have a way of dragging down those we love the most.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Pam

Although this novel has a true story at its heart, it is not a non-fiction novel such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. I think it would have been better sticking closer to the real spy, Melita Norwood, an English woman outed by a KGB defector in the 1990s. The real British spies of the thirties thr......more

Goodreads review by Ints

Šī grāmata nav Džeimsa Bonda stila grāmata ar slēpšanos un pakaļdzīšanos, šaušanu un intrigām. Grāmatas aizraujošā anotācija sākotnēji lika vilties. Šī varētu būt kā praktiskais piemērs Suvorova grāmatai "Spiegošanas pamati" . Patiesībā grāmata ir par cilvēka iekšējo pasauli un lielajām izvēlēm liel......more

Goodreads review by Morgan

Based on true events. Red Joan is the fictionalized story of Melita Stedman Norwood who at the age of 87 was accused of being a Soviet spy during the Cold War. While it appears that she did what she was accused of doing my take-away is that Melita was a naive young woman who did the wrong thing for (......more