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  West, Nigel (ed.), The Guy Liddell Diaries, Vol. 1: 1939–1942 (Routledge, 2005)

  Lambert, Sam (ed.), London Night and Day (Old House, 2014; originally published 1951 by the Architectural Press)

  Panter-Downes, Mollie (ed. William Shawn), London War Notes, 1939–1945 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971)

  Sweet, Matthew, The West End Front (Faber and Faber, 2011)

  Bathgate, Gordon, Voices from the Ether: The History of Radio (Girdleness Publishing, 2012)

  Briggs, Asa, The Golden Age of Wireless: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 1 (OUP, 1995)

  Compton, Nic, The Shipping Forecast (BBC Books, 2016)

  Higgins, Charlotte, The New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (Guardian Books, 2015)

  Hines, Mark, The Story of Broadcasting House (Merrell, 2008)

  Murphy, Kate, Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC (Palgrave, 2016)

  Palmer, Richard, School Broadcasting in Britain (BBC, 1947)

  Fitzgerald, Penelope, Human Voices (Flamingo, 1997; originally published 1980)

  Gorham, Maurice, Sound and Fury: Twenty-One Years in the BBC (Percival Marshall, 1948)

  Horstmann, Rosemary, Half a Life-Story: 1920–1960 (Country Books, 2000)

  Shapley, Olive, Broadcasting a Life (Scarlet Press, 1996)

  Beardmore, George, Civilians at War (OUP, 1986)

  de Courcy, Anne, Debs at War (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005)

  From the National Archives

  KV-2-3874 (The transcriptions of Jack King’s conversations with his fifth-columnist informers)

  KV-4-227-1 (History of the MS, the Jack King operation)

  WO-208-3457, 001-040 (Inventory of the recording equipment used in the M Room)

  KV-2-3800 (The Marita Perigoe case)

  KV-2-84, 1-4 (The Anna Wolkoff case)

  DVDs

  Death at Broadcasting House (Studiocanal)

  BBC: The Voice of Britain, Addressing the Nation (GPO Film Unit Collection Vol. 1, BFI, 2008)

  Acknowledgements

  Lt Col M. Keech, BEM, Royal Signals (retd)

  David Mattock – for some Home Counties geography

  Sam Hallas and the ‘cognoscenti’ of the Telecoms Heritage Group – for their help with telephone area codes of the 1940s

  Simon Rook, Archive Manager, BBC

  And my agent Peter Straus, my editor Marianne Velmans, Alison Barrow, and everyone at Transworld who makes my pages into a book.

  About the Author

  Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. Her 2013 novel Life After Life won the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and voted Book of the Year for the independent booksellers associations on both sides of the Atlantic. It also won the Costa Novel Award, as did her subsequent novel A God in Ruins (2015). Transcription is her latest novel.

  Also by Kate Atkinson

  Behind the Scenes at the Museum

  Human Croquet

  Emotionally Weird

  Not the End of the World

  Case Histories

  One Good Turn

  When Will There Be Good News?

  Started Early, Took My Dog

  Life After Life

  A God in Ruins

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Kate Costello Ltd, 2018

  Cover design by Richard Ogle/TW

  Cover images: flamingo by Anastasia Lembrik/Shutterstock; background by Boris Rabtsevich/Getty Images

  Kate Atkinson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409043768

  ISBN 9780857525888

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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