Spy novel

To some, the female sex might seem ideally suited to spying, and as their exploits in the Special Operations Executive showed, women on both sides of the Atlantic could certainly match men in courage and daring during World War Two. Yet espionage fiction has tended to be a male preserve. Jane Thynne is one of the handful of women novelists to have absorbed the lessons of John le Carré: a spy novel can also be a love story, a quest for institutional integrity and an exploration of inconvenient truths. The female perspective on all this, unsurprisingly, turns out to be worth having. Set in 1938, Midnight in Vienna introduces us to poor, thirtyish, Oxford-educated Stella Fry.