The Spy Who Loved, hardcover edition
This is one of Amazon’s best books for June–and it looks fantastic!
The Spy Who Loved, by Clare Mulley, is the biographical account of the WWII female agent, Christine Granville.
Book Description
In June 1952, a woman was murdered by an obsessive colleague in a hotel in South Kensington. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young is perhaps unsurprising, but that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable.
The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, she would become one of Britain’s most daring and highly decorated special agents. Having fled to Britain on the outbreak of war, she was recruited by the intelligence services long before the establishment of the SOE, and took on mission after mission. She skied over the hazardous High Tatras into occupied Poland, served in Egypt and North Africa and was later parachuted into occupied France, where an agent’s life expectancy was only six weeks.
Christine Granville: “The glamorous girl with the grenade”
Her courage, quick wit and determination, won her release from arrest more than once, and saved the lives of several fellow officers, including one of her many lovers, just hours before their execution by the Gestapo. More importantly, perhaps, the intelligence she gathered was a significant contribution to the Allied war effort and her success was reflected in the fact that she was awarded the George Medal, the OBE and the Croix de Guerre.
In The Spy Who Loved, Clare Mulley tells the extraordinary story of this charismatic and difficult woman; a woman who seemed to know no fear and who exercised a mesmeric power power those who knew her.
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I can already attest to the amazing stories of several female spies who went above and beyond the call of duty during WWII. If the subject has ever interested you, or if you’re a lover of history and biographies, then I encourage you to get The Spy Who Loved (I know I will!).
I think one of the reasons I’m excited about this is because when I conducted my own research, I’d unfortunately found that several of these heroines went unnoticed or forgotten as time passed on.
They made substantial contributions to the Allied cause, and I think they should not be forgotten: Whether it’s an Indian princess who made illegal radio broadcasts in order to aid the Resistance, a widowed mother in her 20’s who could hold her own in a gunfight–or a flirtatious socialite who killed a Nazi with a karate chop (I am not making this up, you should read their stories :-))