The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2013: Mere weeks after Germany s 1939 invasion of Poland, a woman the British Secret Services described as a "flaming Polish patriot, expert skier and great adventuress" had made her way back from South Africa to London with a brazen proposal: to ski into Poland from Hungary via the Carpathian Mountains. By the time Hitler's forces fell, Christine Granville had accomplished this and more extraordinary feats, delivering supplies, gathering vital intelligence, and defying expectations. She became Britain's first (and longest serving) female special agent, conducting undercover operations in two occupied countries and missions in numerous theaters of war, rescuing officers minutes before their execution and bringing hundreds of POWs back to the front lines. This story of how a charismatic Jewish Countess and beauty queen--raised to be a sedate society wife--parlayed her crackling vitality, flair for languages, and intrepid determination into action that directly undermined the Nazis makes for a sweepingly cinematic read. Churchill's favorite spy, one of the most decorated female intelligence agents of WWII, and one of her era's most liberated (and desired) women, Granville was driven by a passion for liberty "in love, in politics, and in life in the widest sense." Mulley has a sensitive, elegant, and wry way with Granville's story, informed by deep research into the scant published and complex unpublished material, and coupled with her own new interviews Christine's living friends and their children that vividly humanize her. And while her murder in 1952 at the hands of a jealous lover robbed her of the chance to fully realize her post-war promise, The Spy Who Loved is a marvelous tribute to her life and legacy. --Mari Malcolm