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Book Summary and Reviews of Fall of Man in Wilmslow by David Lagercrantz

Fall of Man in Wilmslow by David Lagercrantz

Fall of Man in Wilmslow

by David Lagercrantz

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  • Published:
  • May 2016, 368 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From the author of the #1 best seller The Girl in the Spider's Web - an electrifying thriller that begins with Alan Turing's suicide and plunges into a post-war Britain of immeasurable repression, conformity and fear.

June 8, 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 in the sleepy suburb of Wilmslow. It is widely assumed that he has committed suicide, unable to cope with the humiliation of a criminal conviction for gross indecency. But a young detective constable, Leonard Corell, who once dreamed 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 encryption code. Stumbling across evidence of Turing's genius, and sensing an escape from a narrow life, Corell begins to dig deeper. But in the paranoid, febrile atmosphere of the Cold War, loose cannons cannot be tolerated and Corell soon realizes he has much to learn about the dangers of forbidden knowledge.

He is also about to be rocked by two startling developments in his own life, one of which will find him targeted as a threat to national security.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Some memorable prose (Corell recalls a question from his father as reaching "out to him like two open arms") enhances the complex plot." - Publishers Weekly

"A bookend of sorts to Bruce Duffy's fine novel The World as I Found It (1987); full of psychological insight though not much action." - Kirkus

This information about Fall of Man in Wilmslow was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

David Lagercrantz

David Lagercrantz is an acclaimed Swedish journalist and author. He has worked as a crime reporter for Expressen and has written several novels, including the #1 best-selling The Girl in the Spider's Web. He worked with international soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic on his memoir I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, which was short-listed for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and nominated for the August Prize in Sweden. Visit Davis at www.davidlagercrantz.se.

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