story of a woman who starts her career as a transcriptionist (is that the word?!) at MI5, and gets entangled with spies and Nazis. It’s both funny and absorbing. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. This is set in the early 1800s, in the run-up to the First Opium War, and – please, just read it. It’s so good! Obviously, it falls outside your father’s areas of interest, but it’s all about the strange ways events and people connect and influence each other.
