Saving Picasso

Set in the imagined aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Saving Picasso is a spy story quite unlike any other. Barcelona, 1940. Franco is dead. The communists have emerged victorious from the Spanish Civil War and an uneasy peace resides over Europe. International Brigade veteran Richard Clare returns to Spain to cover the Barcelona Olympic games for The London Evening News. Broke, restless and adrift since the end of the war, Clare is intent on finding his former girlfriend Montse, from whom he was acrimoniously parted two years previously. But soon Clare finds himself at the heart of a more sensational story - a plot by Picasso to defect to the west... Pitched somewhere between Robert Harris' Fatherland and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Saving Picasso is an intelligent, gripping read that will appeal to fans of spy thrillers and historical fiction.