Today, a manic cyclist, careless electrician, sex-trafficker threaten more than gauleiter, commissar or prospecting for titanium. Lately, my clapboard room, dusty, stuffy, blazed with a pot of flowers – purple, red, blue – that implies, just possibly, nothing inevitable, that Eeva, in her shrugging, matey way, might suggest we go home. Meanwhile, I must cope with the importunate stranger who regularly stops me in the street. ‘Come for a drink, sir. My treat’, wistful or cunning, lisping. ‘I’ll pay. Don’t worry.’
And then.
PRAISE FOR SECRET PROTOCOLS
‘One of our most ingenious, daring and brilliant novelists, and one admired by other writers.’
‘Inventive and witty, exceptionally exhilarating … His prose is a delight.’
‘A teeming, vivid, unruly fairground of experience, jostling with brilliant detail and palpable immediacy.’
‘Unsurpassed at rendering with compelling immediacy the terrors and furies of catastrophic change.’
‘His prose shimmers like a mosaic … Peter Vansittart has a genuine historical imagination.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PETER VANSITTART (1920–2008) was educated at Haileybury and Worcester College, Oxford. He taught and lectured on English and history, and he reviewed for a number of national newspapers and periodicals. He wrote more than forty works of fiction and non-fiction, many published by Peter Owen.
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Copyright
PETER OWEN PUBLISHERS
81 Ridge Road, London N8 9NP
Peter Owen books are distributed in the USA by
Independent Publishers Group/Trafalgar Square
814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL 60610, USA
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by
Peter Owen Publishers
This ebook edition 2014
© Peter Vansittart 2006
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
PAPERBACK ISBN 0-7206-1264-0
EPUB ISBN 978-0-7206-1762-7
MOBIPOCKET ISBN 978-0-7206-1763-4
PDF ISBN 978-0-7206-1764-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library