The Guardian of Lies

by Kate Furnivall

First published 2019

Amazon

3.9(3,079)

France, 1953. Eloïse Caussade grows up on a bull farm in the Camargue before following her older brother André into a world shaped by intelligence work and the confrontation between the Western powers and the Soviet Union. When André is badly injured, Eloïse believes the attack is connected with his CIA work and begins searching for the person responsible.

Her investigation returns her to a region divided over a new American airbase and the presence of nuclear weapons. Soviet agents exploit local resentment, loyalties within Eloïse's own family become uncertain and the distinction between political conviction and espionage begins to collapse. The novel uses the Camargue and Paris to explore the early Cold War at a moment when France had become a contested arena for American influence and Soviet intelligence.