A powerful tale of honour, prejudice and the twentieth century's most maltreated hero
June 8, 1954. Alan Turing, the visionary mathematician, is found dead at his home in sleepy Wilmslow, dispatched by a poisoned apple.
Taking the case, Detective Constable Leonard Corell quickly learns Turing is a convicted homosexual. Confident it's a suicide, he is nonetheless confounded by official secrecy over Turing's war record. What is more, Turing's sexuality appears to be causing alarm among the intelligence services - could he have been blackmailed by Soviet spies?
Stumbling across evidence of Turing's genius, and sensing an escape from a narrow life, Corell soon becomes captivated by Turing's brilliant and revolutionary work, and begins to dig deeper.
But in the paranoid, febrile atmosphere of the Cold War, loose cannons cannot be tolerated. As his innocent curiosity fast takes him far out of his depth, Corell realises he has much to learn about the dangers of forbidden knowledge.
David Lagercrantz was born in 1962, and is an acclaimed author and journalist. As well as numerous biographies (including the internationally bestselling I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, for which he was the ghostwriter) he has written four novels, of which this is the first to be translated into English. In December 2013 it was announced that he would write a continuation of Stieg Larsson's Millennium series.
