An innovative bio-fiction based on the life of Soviet spy Harry Gold that brilliantly breaks new ground between fiction and biography

This is a story about a spy. And a spy, by definition, lies. So how to write the life of a spy? Eschewing the confines of traditional biography and inverting the glamour of espionage, acclaimed biographer Millicent Dillon blends fact and fiction to chronicle the human drama of Harry Gold, the American chemist who became a Soviet spy.

Dillon has researched Gold's outer life throughly, as a biographer would. She them limns his inner life to create a profound and compelling character study of a self-described "little man" who personifies the larger symbolism of this complex era in American history.

In casting Gold's story as a novel, Dillon creates a gripping narrative from the true events of political life in America from the 30s through the McCarthy era, from Gold's recruitment to his training in tradecraft to his role in Julius Rosenberg's and Klaus Fuchs's atomic espionage at Los Alamos. The result is a novel with the psychological depth of Graham Greene's The Third Man , the taut pacing of All The President's Men , and the moral poignancy of Philip Roth's I Married a Communist .