Kate Atkinson, Transcription *** 1/2

Transcription is a spy novel written by a literary novelist. It's similar to an Alan Furst novel in that the main character is not a professional but a regular person whose mundane job happens to involve espionage. 

London, 1940. Juliet is an eighteen-year-old who gets recruited into MI5 to transcribe conversations between an agent posing as a Nazi spy and the "fifth column" informants who pass him information. Her bosses also take advantage of her naive character to have her infiltrate a group of women sympathetic to the Germans. At the same time, she harbors romantic feelings about her (older) boss, who sends mixed signals about whether the feelings are reciprocated.

I appreciated how the espionage happened almost in the background of Juliet's personal development, leaving the reader to assume more than Juliet seemed to understand. When the story jumps forward to 1950, the pace of events picks up making the story a bit scattered. It starts to be more like a traditional spy novel in that we're asked to guess about everyone's motivations. And of course, many of the characters turn out to have had ulterior motives back in the war.