Fall Of Man In Wilmslow

Description

From the author of the #1 bestseller The Girl in the Spider's Web, an electrifying thriller that begins with Alan Turing's suicide and then opens out to take in a young detective's awakening to painful secrets about his own life--and the life of his country.

 

It's 1954. Several English nationals have defected to the USSR, while a witch hunt for homosexuals rages across Britain. In these circumstances, no one is surprised when a mathematician by the name of Alan Turing is found dead in his home: it is widely assumed that he committed suicide, unable to cope with the humiliation of a criminal conviction for homosexuality. But young Detective Sergeant Leonard Corell, who had always dreamt of a career in higher mathematics, suspects greater forces are involved. In the face of opposition from his superiors, he begins to assemble the pieces of a puzzle that lead him to one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war: the Bletchley Park operation to crack the Nazis' Enigma code. But he is also about to be rocked by two startling developments in his own life, one of which will find him being pursued as a threat to national security...

Reviews

Has the faintest whiff of W.G. Sebald; haunted characters determined to pull others down into turbid, oppressive currents of memory and ideas. You are willingly drawn down with them -- Sinclair McKay Spectator Lagercrantz neatly intertwines the facts of Turing's life with the fiction of Corell's quest for knowledge to create an unsettling story of state secrets and sexual hypocrisy -- Nick Rennison Sunday Times Absorbing ... Gets the synapses sparking ... Lagercrantz is at home with a damaged hero who has more of an affinity with computers than humans -- Jake Kerridge Sunday Telegraph A persuasive evocation of Turing's genius and of a Britain still suffering under rationing and repression -- Harry Ritchie Daily Mail Perhaps the most signal achievement here is the clever melding of two narrative forms: a sympathetic biography of a real historical figure treated appallingly by the establishment, and a police procedural in which a dogged copper tries to crack a mystery in the teeth of bloody-minded intransigence -- Barry Forshaw Independent

Author description

David Lagercrantz was born in 1962, and is an acclaimed author and journalist. In 2015 The Girl in the Spider's Web, his continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, became a worldwide bestseller, and it was announced that Lagercrantz would write two further novels in the series. He is also the author of the acclaimed and bestselling I am Zlatan Ibramhimovic, and Fall of Man in Wilmslow, a novel about Alan Turing.