#4 Enigma by Robert Harris

Robert Harris' most famous novel may be Fatherland, an alternative history in which the Nazis won the war, but Enigma comes a close second. Written in 1992 and adapted into a film in 2001 Enigma depicts the efforts of mathematicians trying to break the German Enigma code against the backdrop of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Harris is a political journalist and it shows in his writing. His prose is relaxed yet he has an eye for exact descriptions, a few telling details which bring a character or scene to life. Enigma is told through the eyes of Tom Jericho, a brilliant young crypto-analyst worked to exhaustion in the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. He returns to find the woman he loved is missing in suspicious circumstances and that the enigma code is still unbreakable. These two obsessions come together and escalate in dramatic circumstances.

Through Jericho's eyes the reader is also quietly shown the realities of wartime Britain - the food rationing, the ill-fitting clothes, the lack of toiletries and cosmetics, the dim and overcrowded trains and the grimness of a winter with little fuel. Although the main theme of the novel is the breaking of enigma, and the toll it took on the men who worked on it, it is the evocations of grim, austere wartime Britain that lingers afterwards.

Read On: Fatherland, Archangel and The Ghost - a political thriller now made into a film starring Ewan MacGregor - all by Robert Harris.