This image is the cover for the book Villa Golitsyn

Villa Golitsyn

An act of treason reverberates from Indonesia to the British Embassy in this thriller of political espionage from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Alive.

After an appalling act of sedition results in the mass slaughter of Indonesian guerillas in the jungles of Borneo, suspicion of treason falls on charismatic Cambridge graduate Willy Ludley. A brilliant junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Jakarta, Ludley has disappeared to the South of France. Simon Milson, an old friend, is enlisted to find him and extract a confession. Not a formal investigation, he reasons. Perhaps more like a game.

But when Milson arrives at Ludley’s villa in Nice, he’s startled to find more players than he anticipated, each with an unknowable agenda: Ludley’s tormented but devoted wife; a closeted gay friend from Cambridge and his grossly flirtatious new American fiancée; and a teenage runaway who has mysteriously attached herself to all of them. Over the next couple of days, as loyalties shift, sexual temptations become a weapon, and betrayals are exposed, the truth behind a treasonous act will be just one more revelation at the Villa Golitsyn.

“As if a story dreamed up by Eugene O’Neill had been dramatized by John le Carré,” The Villa Golitsyn is part espionage novel, part thriller, and part tale of political and sexual intrigue (TheNew York Times). It delivers, above all, “a tightly woven story of jealousy that holds the attention to the very end” (The Sunday Times).

Piers Paul Read

Piers Paul Read, third son of poet and art critic Sir Herbert Read, was born in 1941, raised in North Yorkshire, and educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College. After studying history at Cambridge University, he spent two years in Germany, and on his return to London, worked as a subeditor on the Times Literary Supplement. His first novel, Game in Heaven with Tussy Marx, was published in 1966. His fiction has won the Hawthornden Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Two of his novels, A Married Man and The Free Frenchman, have been adapted for television and a third, Monk Dawson, as a feature film. In 1974, Read wrote his first work of reportage, Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which has since sold five million copies worldwide. A film of Alive was released in 1993, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Ethan Hawke. His other works of nonfiction include Ablaze, an account of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl; The Templars, a history of the crusading military order; Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, and The Dreyfus Affair. Read is a fellow and member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the Council of the Society of Authors. He lives in London.
 
 

Open Road Integrated Media