England in 1943: deciding to throw herself into war work, Nancy Callaghan joins the Special Operations Executive in Baker Street. There, she begins solving ‘indecipherables’ – scrambled messages from agents in the field.
Then Nancy meets Tom Lockwood, a quiet genius when it comes to coding. Together they come up with the idea of printing codes on silk, so agents can hide them in their clothing to avoid detection by the enemy.
Nancy and Tom grow close, and soon she is hopelessly in love.
But there is a traitor in Baker Street, and suspicions turn towards Tom. When Nancy is asked to spy on Tom, she must make the ultimate sacrifice and complete a near-impossible mission.
Could the man she loves be the enemy?
The Silk Code by Deborah Swift is published in paperback on 20 July, 2023.
She’s a generous contributor to Historia. Here are some of her features for us:
A different kind of WWII resistance
Mask wearing and crime in Renaissance Venice
Slashing the face: punishing unfaithful women in Italy
In search of the animals in the Great Fire of London
And so to bed – a goodbye to Pepys’s diary
Animating Pepys’s women
