While such is indeed the case with internationally-renowned writer Daniel Silva’s latest thriller, The English Spy, the author can be excused for all his odd coincidences and improbable scenarios, because in aggregate the book comes across as a rollicking good read - which, the author himself implies in a useful author’s note, is all that it is really meant to be. Hence, it is impossible for even the best of them to come across as ‘authentic’ in any meaningful sense of the word. Silva returned to Washington and went to work for CNN and became Executive Producer of its talk show unit including shows like Crossfire, Capital Gang and Reliable Sources.THE tragedy underlying even the best espionage novels is that they are designed as entertainment, not fact. In 1987, while covering the Iran-Iraq war, he met NBC Today National Correspondent Jamie Gangel and they were married later that year. Later that year Silva abandoned his studies and joined UPI fulltime, working first in San Francisco, then on the foreign desk in Washington, and finally as Middle East correspondent in Cairo and the Persian Gulf. Born in Michigan, raised and educated in California, he was pursuing a master’s degree in international relations when he received a temporary job offer from United Press International to help cover the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Silva knew from a very early age that he wanted to become a writer, but his first profession would be journalism. Gabriel Allon appears in Silva’s next twenty-one novels, each one more successful than the last.

The novel featured a character described as one of the most memorable and compelling in contemporary fiction, the art restorer and sometime Israeli secret agent Gabriel Allon, and though Silva did not realize it at the time, Gabriel’s adventures had only just begun. But it was Silva’s fourth novel, The Kill Artist, which would alter the course of his career. His second and third novels, The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season, were also instant New York Times bestsellers and starred two of Silva’s most memorable characters: CIA officer Michael Osbourne and international hit man Jean-Paul Delaroche. Silva burst onto the scene in 1997 with his electrifying bestselling debut, The Unlikely Spy, a novel of love and deception set around the Allied invasion of France in World War II. Compelling, passionate, haunting, brilliant: these are the words that have been used to describe the work of award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling author Daniel Silva. He has been called his generation’s finest writer of international intrigue and one of the greatest American spy novelists ever.

The english spy by daniel silva