The most persuasive espionage fiction

The first spy story written by someone who had been there and done that. A humane and compassionate antidote to two-fisted, square-jawed heroes battling dastardly foreigners. The head of British Intelligence is known only as "R", anticipating James Bond's "M" by a quarter of a century

Thoughtful spy novels began with Somerset Maugham's Ashenden, featuring a detached hero on a journey to disillusion, a process brought to its apotheosis by le Carre via Greene

A collection of stories so accurate that Churchill ordered the destruction of 14 of them, while Russian intelligence immediately set up a special unit to read British spy novels for clues

Ignites with an energy that should ensure short-listing in the next Man Booker Prize....Farndale's evocation of trench warfare surpasses Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong...Of the book's many accomplishments perhaps the strongest is the writing itself. Exquisite and luminous...Farndale gives a master class in the power of literature to illuminate the physical world and the human soul.

Love, cowardice and redemption are the themes that stalk Farndale's beautifully intelligent tale.

Profound, moving and compelling. A beautifully composed novel.

A beguiling and resonant novel of ideas. The action is vivid and absorbing...although this intergenerational family drama is plotted like a thriller, it's also a novel of ideas, throwing light on the strange dance between religion and science.

Beautiful...Farndale's elegant prose, his storytelling ability and the wise tolerance with which he views...his characters lend his exhilarating novel a tenderly redemptive afterimage.

It makes exhilarating reading, all the better for its satirical edge.

Love, terrorism, plane crashes, Passchendaele, religious visions... The highest compliment one can pay Farndale... is that the material is so well marshalled that the narrative unfurls without strain....beautifully done.

Philosophically ambitious and deftly crafted, Nigel Farndale's novel has one leg planted in the trenches of the First World War and the other placed sure-footedly in the present...perspicacious observations of human behaviour... beautiful.

A constantly engaging and witty novel from a tremendously clever writer.

Plausiby drawn....strong central characters, interesting subplots and well-sketched minor characters.

As idiosyncratic as it is ambitious...given shape and purpose by a true literary craftsman. The book both keeps you reading and makes you think.

I drank in Nigel Farndale's The Blasphemer in huge lungfuls, and mourned it when it was finished. For anyone who loved Saturday, Atonement or Birdsong, this is the generational novel at its best.