Michaela Kolowski

So what's at stake is that Marva has been allowed to leave Iran and come to Oxford because he's studying as part of a team of physicists, a very small team, and he thinks he's made a discovery.

And when he first tells John Dyer about the discovery, even John doesn't know if he actually believes that Marva has succeeded in doing this because Marva says he claims he has been able to work out how to harness nuclear energy in a way that is simple and doable.

And if he's right, it could be the solution to solving an international energy crisis, or it could be used in war.

So Marvar is immediately excited about what he says he's done.

And we never actually find out if Marvar was, if what he said was true, that he actually had worked out how to safely create nuclear fusion.

It puts Mavar in a terrible dilemma because he doesn't know who to give this information to or who to keep it from.

And he also knows that if his government back home in Iran find out that he has been able to crack the code for nuclear fusion, that they will do anything, go to any lengths to get that information out of him.

I think your theory does hold up.

I think there's a very strong strand in this novel, which is about what it means to be a journalist, what it means to be a truth seeker or a truth teller.

And in the case of John Dyer, he's somebody whose career really stalled because he gathered a very important story in Brazil and then wouldn't publish it for a whole variety of reasons that are made clear in the book.

So I think there's something to that.

There is something about silence.

I mostly read this book, I have to say, as a pretty much a fantastically, mostly well-written page turner that was in the kind of literary spy thriller kind of genre.

I really enjoyed it for that.

And that's what I thought it was mainly about.

And what I would say is that...

There's even a character in the book whose name is very similar to Updike.

But it's in that vein, definitely.

And I think that one thing I would say that elevates this book is that the plot and the structure are so strong.

They're so, the actual central story that drives, in effect, the action for Marvar's decision and then his disappearance is brilliantly controlled by Nicholas Shakespeare.