Jack & Emily

Two young Americans meet by chance in a sun-cut village on the island of Crete in 1988, at the end of the cold war and the start of the age of terrorism. Jack is a CIA case officer, weary of his emotionally limited life and agency work. A poet and traveler, Emily has come to the end of a two-year odyssey around the Mediterranean, mourning her mother’s death. Jack’s most valued and deeply maddening asset is Ali, with a history of training foreign fighters for Osama bin Laden and an avowed double agent. Emily’s father, a British banker, Iran hand, and occasional spy who fought in Crete during the Second World War, surprises Emily by bringing to Crete his much younger second wife and their precocious five-year-old daughter. Complications follow. Jack & Emily is a spy novel, love story, and snapshot of a family saga worn about the edges.

Brian Kiteley’s signature lyric sensibility and gift for spring-loaded compression combine perfectly with the crisp exigencies of the classic international spy novel in his newest novel. Taut thriller, tough romance and unambiguous love letter to the southern Mediterranean and the country-sized island of Crete, Jack & Emily is a marvelous book, one that evokes Graham Greene and Len Deighton at their best with just enough Harry Mathews in the mix to keep things sprightly.

—Laird Hunt, the author of Zorrie

 Jack & Emily exhilarated me not as a standard spy novel, but in how it subverts the conventions of the spy novel to create a genre all its own—part love story, part examination of U.S. foreign policy prior to 9/11, part meditation on storytelling itself. Maybe “Kiteley” should be CIA lingo for “sly.” Instead of the terse, hardboiled dialogue of action movies, he gives us eloquent exchanges in full, rounded paragraphs. CIA employee Jack is more like a guy you knew in college than, say, Jason Bourne. As for suspense, Kiteley pushes most of the major events off stage, taking us by surprise and forcing us to glean what’s already happened—almost like we’re the true intelligence experts in this thrillingly original novel.

—Clifford Chase, author of Winkie and The Tooth Fairy

Jack & Emily is a clandestine confession, an illumination of difficult encounters that might become the source of both love and regret. Brian Kiteley’s story immerses us in the shadow world of Jack, a disillusioned CIA operative, and Emily, who is drifting around the Mediterranean and waiting for something to happen. The setting is lush on the page—the breeze off the water, a glass of the local aperitif, the salty tang of the olives on the tongue […] evocative in language, passionate in person, but constrained by both Jack’s work and Emily’s family connection to governmental intrigue. Even more than secrecy, the limitations of knowing rest at heart of these characters hopes and their quiet search for not simply answers but purpose.

—Janet Bland, author of A Fish Full of River