The Midnight Swimmer

A brilliant Cuban Missile Crisis spy thriller by a former special forces officer who is ''poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carre''

''Edward Wilson seems poised to inherit the mantle of John le Carre'' Irish Independent

''More George Smiley than James Bond, Catesby will delight those readers looking for less blood and more intelligence in their spy thrillers'' Publishers Weekly

October, 1962. If the Cuban gamble goes wrong and war breaks out, Britain will cease to exist.

Whitehall dispatches a secret envoy to defuse the confrontation. Spawned in the bleak poverty of an East Anglian fishing port, Catesby is a spy with an anti-establishment chip on his shoulder. He loves his country, but despises the class who run it.

Though he is loathed by the Americans for his left-wing sympathies, Catesby is sent to Havana and Washington to make clandestine contacts. London has authorised Catesby to offer Moscow a secret deal to break the deadlock.

But before it can be sealed, he meets the Midnight Swimmer, who has a chilling message for Washington.

''An intellectually commanding thriller'' Independent

''An excellent spy novel . . . belongs on the bookshelf alongside similarly unsettling works by le Carre, Alan Furst and Eric Ambler'' Huffington Post

Praise for Edward Wilson:

''Stylistically sophisticated . . . Wilson knows how to hold the reader''s attention'' W.G. Sebald

''A reader is really privileged to come across something like this'' Alan Sillitoe

''All too often, amid the glitzy gadgetry of the spy thriller, all the fast cars and sexual adventures, we lose sight of the essential seriousness of what is at stake. John le Carre reminds us, often, and so does Edward Wilson'' Independent