The Spy Who Loved Me: Read the tenth gripping unforgettable James Bond novel (James Bond 007, 10) - Softcover

Fleming, Ian

3.4

13,437 ratings by Goodreads

9780099578024: The Spy Who Loved Me: Read the tenth gripping unforgettable James Bond novel (James Bond 007, 10)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099578026 ISBN 13: 9780099578024

Publisher: Vintage, 2012

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Vivienne Michel is a troubled young woman on the run. Fleeing England she comes to a deserted motel in the Adirondack Mountains where she thinks she has finally escaped her past.

Sluggsy and Horror are ruthless mobsters on a mission of their own. Holding a terrified Viv hostage in the motel, they plot death and destruction.

Bond has just one night to take on the gangsters. But with two hardened killers to outwit, and time running out, can he save Vivienne – and himself?

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Review:

"I felt the prod of a gun in my back but swung the door wide open ... I had gambled that they wouldn't shoot. They hadn't. Now all depended on the solitary man who stood on the threshold." When James Bond makes his first appearance in The Spy Who Loved Me, the novel is two thirds complete. It is Fleming's most experimental Bond story but one of his most successful, developing characters with a new fullness and constructing an adventure which builds momentum through a series of genuinely thrilling crescendos. We may see comparatively little of Bond himself here but The Spy Who Loved Me reveals more of the man than ever before.

This is the story of Vivienne Michel, a Bond Girl with a difference, whose first-person narration moves through three sections: "Me", describing her childhood, unhappiness and disastrous love affairs; "Them", in which she escapes the past only to find herself caught up in a life-threatening insurance job at the Dreamy Pines Motel Court; and "Him", where Bond enters and the story moves rapidly towards its resolution. There's a mythical quality to James Bond's appearance and disappearance from the action, but Fleming explores his character with great realism, enjoying the freedom to observe his hero objectively.

In many ways this is barely a Bond story at all--the book is firmly in Fleming's gangster tradition and Bond is not even on a mission, just stepping by chance into someone else's nightmare--but The Spy Who Loved Me is nonetheless one of the most exciting and skilful additions to the 007 canon. --Iain Campbell

Review:

"Ian Fleming keeps you riveted" (Sunday Telegraph)

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