An Officer and a Spy

Resumen del libro

From the bestselling author of Fatherland, a gripping historical thriller in which the hunter becomes the hunted. January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of twenty thousand spectators baying 'Death to the Jew!' The officer is rewarded with promotion: Picquart is made the French army's youngest colonel and put in command of 'the Statistical Section' - the shadowy intelligence unit that tracked down Dreyfus.

The spy, meanwhile, is given a punishment of medieval cruelty: Dreyfus is shipped off to a lifetime of solitary confinement on Devil's Island - unable to speak to anyone, not even his guards, his case seems closed forever. But gradually Picquart comes to believe there is something rotten at the heart of the Statistical Section. When he discovers another German spy operating on French soil, his superiors are oddly reluctant to pursue it.

Despite official warnings, Picquart persists, and soon the officer and the spy are in the same predicament. Narrated by Picquart, An Officer and a Spy is a compelling recreation of a scandal that became the most famous miscarriage of justice in history. Compelling, too, are the echoes for our modern world: an intelligence agency gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, a newspaper witch-hunt of a persecuted minority, and the age-old instinct of those in power to cover-up their crimes.

Biografía del autor

P B Robert Harris /B es uno de los escritores ingleses más respetados y elogiados hoy, su nombre es sinónimo de I bestseller /I de gran calidad y sus libros se traducen a cuarenta ideiomas. Entre sus numerosos títulos destacan los I thrillers Patria /I , I Enigma /I , I El poder en la sombra /I y I El índice del miedo /I , y las novelas históricas I Pompeya /I y la Trilogía de Cicerón, sobre los últimos turbulentos años de la República romana, integrada por I Imperium /I , I Conspiración /I y I Dictator /I .<br> P Harris nació en el Reino Unido en 1957. Graduado por la Universidad de Cambridge, ha sido reportero de la BBC, redactor jefe de la sección de política para el diario I The Observer /I y columnista en I The Sunday Times /I y I The Daily Telegraph /I . En 2003 fue nombrado columnista del año en los premios de la prensa británica. Por su colaboración con el director Roman Polanski en la versión cinematográfica de I El poder en la sombra /I , que se tituló I El escritor /I , ganó el César y el premio del Cine Europeo al mejor guión adaptado.<br>