She supposed she would miss the rest of them now. It was Wednesday – the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth. The string quartets, all fifteen parsed out in servings of three a day at the Wigmore Hall. She had been at a concert – Shostakovich. Someone official, someone who must have looked in her bag and found something with her name on it. Between the darkness and the daylight.Ī policeman? Or a paramedic. It might have been her own fault, she had been distracted – she had lived for so long abroad that she had probably looked the wrong way when she was crossing Wigmore Street in the midsummer twilight.

She could although she didn’t seem able to respond. ‘Miss Armstrong? Miss Armstrong, can you hear me?’ Read an excerpt from Transcription: The Children’s Hour Her 2013 novel Life After Life spent a record number of weeks on top of the bestsellers lists on both sides of the Atlantic, and won the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize and the Costa Novel Award, a prize Kate Atkinson won again in 2015 for A God in Ruins. Her bestselling novels include four featuring former detective Jackson Brodie, which became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. Kate Atkinson won the Costa (formerly the Whitbread) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of this country’s most exceptional writers. Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realise that there is no action without consequence. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever.ġ0 years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathisers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. In 1940, 18-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage.

‘Think of it as an adventure, Perry had said right at the beginning of all this. Penguin Random House has shared an extract from Transcription, the magnificent new novel by bestselling, award-winning Kate Atkinson, author of a Life After Life and A God In Ruins.

Transcription novel review