When they meet, they “nip home for lunch” at Fred’s flat where his wife Christine serves them her usual badly cooked sausage and chips. The second thread is that of Percival Godliman, an historian, expert in the Middle Ages, recruited, as World War II starts, to lead an anti-spy operation and to work alongside Fred Bloggs, a young Scotland Yard inspector with a cockney accent. Good only for raising sheep, it has a house at one end for the shepherd and a second at the other into which David and Lucy move and where, in several months, they begin to raise their newborn son Jo. To escape the well-meaning but oppressive attention of family and friends, the couple moves to a tiny speck in the North Sea east of Aberdeen, a ten-mile-long sliver of land, one mile wide, called Storm Island. David loses both legs and falls into a deep, untouchable depression. One story thread is that of the English couple David and Lucy Rose whose 1940 wedding day ends in the tragedy of a car crash. And a key reason for that is Follett’s decision to tell his story from three perspectives. Ken Follett’s 1978 novel Eye of the Needle works so well - nearly half a century later, it remains a gripping read - that it may well be the perfect thriller.
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