Nicholas Shakespeare: The Sandpit, Vintage (Penguin Random House UK) 9781787301771, C Format Paperback, May 2020
German Edition: “Boomerang”, Hoffmann & Campe, Hardback, Mai 2020

Vintage who publish Nicholas Shakespeare’s “The Sandpit” compare his novel with those of Graham Greene and John Le Carre, there is definitely a likeness. 

In my view  the element of a thriller was not the dominating red string running through the book; it is the captivating narration told in the present of a journalist, John Dyer, who has recently returned from Rio de Janeiro to Oxford where he is leading a quiet life, writing a book about a Brazilian tribe, and getting himself involuntarily mixed up in the disappearance of an Iranian nuclear physicist, Rustum Marvar, the father of one of his son Leonardo’s friends  who is attending his old posh prep school. Dyer seems to be the last person who saw him before he disappeared without a trace.  Suddenly some people, parents he knows from watching his son’s weekly football games, start inviting and questioning him about his friendship with Marvar displaying great interest in his knowledge of what appears to be a groundbreaking breakthrough Rustum is rumored to have made at his lab. Soon Dyer finds himself in a dangerous situation facing an impossible dilemma: how to guard his and his son’s life and how not to betray the trust Marvar had placed in him.

“The Sandpit” is a very clever story without using heart-throbbing thriller effects but keeping you hooked just the same. I particularly liked how neatly Nicholas Shakespeare tied it all up in the end.