“Life After Life” introduced me to Kate Atkinson’s imagination and prose, and I’m an admirer of her Jackson Brodie series. “Transcription” is somewhat of a detour, a literary post-WWII spy thriller set in England. A young precocious woman, recruited to perform a minor role in a wartime counter-espionage department, discovers a decade later, as a BBC producer, that the past never goes away. Atkinson’s lead character is wonderful and her writing is immersive, but spy fiction is a demanding genre, and a right-angle plot twist at the end left me a little nonplussed. Fans of the current revival in wartime and post-war stories could well lap this us and I raced through the read in Atkinson’s masterful hands.
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