Juliet’s voice is clear, eloquent and pleasingly distinctive, and the tone of the era rings throughout the language in a way that feels both natural and convincing.

(She felt sure that he wasn’t.)’ – is in full force.

Juliet is a compelling character, and Atkinson’s gift for delivering character traits in a series of pithy observations – ‘He began to read out loud as if it were a script and he a rather poor actor. The prose is as confident and self-assured as readers of Atkinson have come to expect. The novel conforms neither to genre nor expectations how can it when it is full of the flair that has twice won the author the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Prize? They are inscrutable, fleeting, removed from complete comprehension – much like the labyrinthine Secret Service that Atkinson depicts with such wit. As you would expect of Atkinson’s complex, almost feverishly layered characterisation, the characters are neither straightforward nor one-dimensional. Yet Transcription defies such a neat, simplified description. When a chance encounter with a man she knew during the war leaves her disturbed and inquisitive, she begins to investigate the people that have populated her past lives. Ten years later, Juliet is working at the BBC, and is continually preoccupied by the past. Both impossibly naïve and unusually worldly, Juliet’s main contribution to war work is the menial – and frequently frustrating – task of transcribing the meetings of a double agent and his loyal band of Nazi sympathisers.

The year is 1940, and the war has not yet properly begun. Juliet Armstrong is eighteen years old when she is recruited into the British Secret Service. Transcription’s duality, however, is of another kind: it is the spy novel that is not really about spies. Spy novels, after all, abound with duality: characters who are not entirely what they seem, secret double agents, the polarising dichotomy of one side versus another. For a novel that is concerned with spies and espionage, with hidden identities and masked lives, this is perhaps not entirely surprising. Transcription – the latest offering from bestselling author Kate Atkinson – is a work of complete duality.

Transcription kate atkinson characters