The master storyteller San Francisco Chronicle behind the New York Times bestseller The Spy and the Traitor uncovers the true story behind the Cold Wars most intrepid female spy. An immensely exciting fastmoving account.The Washington Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Foreign Affairs Kirkus Reviews Library Journal In 1942 in a quiet village in the leafy English Cotswolds a thin elegant woman lived in a small cottage with her three children and her husband who worked as a machinist nearby. Ursula Burton was friendly but reserved and spoke English with a slight foreign accent. By all accounts she seemed to be living a simple unassuming life. Her neighbors in the village knew little about her. They didnt know that she was a highranking Soviet intelligence officer. They didnt know that her husband was also a spy or that she was running powerful agents across Europe. Behind the facade of her picturesque life Burton was a dedicated Communist a Soviet colonel and a veteran agent gathering the scientific secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the bomb. This truelife spy story is a masterpiece about the woman codenamed Sonya. Over the course of her career she was hunted by the Chinese the Japanese the Nazis MI5 MI6 and the FBIand she evaded them all. Her story reflects the great ideological clash of the twentieth centurybetween Communism Fascism and Western democracyand casts new light on the spy battles and shifting allegiances of our own times. With unparalleled access to Sonyas diaries and correspondence and neverbeforeseen information on her clandestine activities Ben Macintyre has conjured a pageturning history of a legendary secret agent a woman who influenced the course of the Cold War and helped plunge the world into a decadeslong standoff between nuclear superpowers. show more