The many hats of Kate Atkinson

KATE ATKINSON PAYS CLOSE ATTENTION TO history—and how it repeats itself. In the best-selling writer’s 10th novel, Transcription, an unlikely spy, Juliet Armstrong, receives an assignment that will alter her life forever. With a complicated structure—something of a signature for Atkinson—the book highlights the cost of living in a time when no one can be sure of alliances and loyalties, and where rising nationalism threatens the world order. Her characters, maneuvering in the 1940s and 1950s, speak directly to our time.

Transcription is one of the