Author Will Jonson describes himself as “a child of the Cold War” and says he grew up watching documentaries that said the Red Army could be “in Calais in six days”.
He wanted to tell a story that touched on that aspect of history, using flashbacks to switch between the present and the past, and juxtaposing events around his story.
However, the book is also about Will’s “love of words and languages” and contains snippets of German, Russian and even Urdu.
He has already started on his second novel and plans to have that finished by early 2015.
That too is set in the past, in the summer of 1966, and a moment in time for a young man of 18 between school and university.
Will describes it as “counterfactual”, so history has been changed, and in this case it is what follows after Britain makes peace with Germany following the Second World War, and the growing German influence.