It is 1941 and bombs have turned London into the front line of a world war. In the shadows of the Blitz, Hitler’s agents are running a blackmail operation to obtain documents that could bring the nation to instant defeat. Arthur Rowe, a man once convicted of a notorious mercy killing, stumbles onto a German spy operation in Bloomsbury and must be silenced. But even with his memory taken from him, he is still a very dangerous witness. A taut thriller and a haunting exploration of pity, love, and guilt, The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene is universally acknowledged as one of the greatest of all spy novels. With an introduction by the biographer and editor Professor Richard Greene. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector’s Library is a series of beautifully bound gift editions of much loved classic titles.

Graham Greene was born in Berkhamstead, England in 1904. The fourth of six children, he was educated at Berkhamstead school, where his father was headmaster, and then at Oxford University. He went on to work as a journalist for The Times where he met Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who was instrumental in his conversion to Catholicism. They married in 1927 and had two children. Greene’s first novel, The Man Within (1929), was favourably received and kick-started a prolific writing career that included the novels Brighton Rock (1938) and Our Man in Havana (1958), short stories, biographies, plays and travel books, as well as film criticism. Considered one of the leading novelists of his generation, he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. Greene died in Switzerland in April 1991.