Patrick Worrall Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Patrick Worrall is an English author of espionage novels, popularly 2023 debut novel The Partisan: A Spy Thriller. He attended King’s College, Cambridge, where he won the Rylands Prize for English. Besides writing, Patrick has worked as a teacher in Asia and Eastern Europe as a reporter and newspaper journalist.

Chess has historically been used as a political allegory, especially during the cold war, when it rose to prominence much like the espionage thriller. The action of Worrall’s ambitious debut thriller jumps forward and backward in time to the year 2004. Former rebellion fighter Greta visits her native Lithuania to share her experiences during World War II and 1961, when construction on the Berlin Wall, a more tangible symbol of east-west relations, began.

Yulia and Michael, two chess prodigies with influential parents on opposite sides of the iron barrier, first encounter each other at this time and fall in love. This complicated, detailed work, which goes to London, the city of Moscow, Eastern Europe, and Valencia, has a huge cast and a vast geographic scope, so it takes some time for the many strands to come together. However, paying attention gets rewarded with a gripping and sadly poignant narrative considering the present state of Ukraine.
As mentioned earlier, the Cold War was like a game of chess. But in this case, you don’t need to know anything about chess as you will witness in real time how the Cold War participants sacrificed their real players when necessary for their advantage, just like how chess players sacrifice pieces to gain an advantage. Like chess, the cold war participants played their game and took their chances.

The Partisan story opens up in Lithuania in 2004. We meet an older woman who tells us of her past, how she fought and hid in the forest during the second world war as a teenager and later tracked and killed the Soviets and Nazis during the Cold War in the ’60s. Hiding in the forest, she was one of the three girls will skills to scavenge, track and kill animals for food and enemies for their safety. She would often take the other girls, Riva and Vita, to gather mushrooms deep in the forest. Greta would do this to show the girls which there good to eat and which were poisonous.

There is tenderness and youthfulness romance in the chess parts of the story. An English boy named Michael meets a Russian damsel named Yulia during a tournament in London. Yulia is the daughter of Sergei, a person important to the government with military secrets. Her mother, Anna, was among the first women to join Politburo, so Yulia is keenly guided throughout. If she needs to attend a chess tournament, she is often escorted by two masculine men who also sleep in her suite at the hotel.

On the other hand, Michael is the son of Sir Stephen Fitzgerald, a British Vice-Admiral, and is almost instantly smitten upon seeing Yulia for the first time. The two become friends, meeting secretly where Michael learns of Yulia’s background and her bodyguards. As the story progresses from one tournament to the next, the activities of Michael and Yulia’s parents become central to the theme.

No one is safe from the highly powerful people controlling the agents and assassins as political intrigue sweeps across Europe. This excellent and intricately plotted first novel culminates in an exciting climax. It mainly takes place in the sixties during the Cold War, with glimpses of World War II, focusing on the role of partisans in the Lithuanian forests.

Patrick Worrall’s book is an incredible yet intricate historical espionage novel that mainly focuses on the deadly era of the cold war during the 1960s. At the same time, the story moves back and forth in time and allows the reader to glimpse the future in 2004 Lithuania, where we meet Greta narrating the events from life in Zukauskiene. While Greta isn’t her real name, she evolves into Lithuania’s powerful yet dangerous resistance fighter during the second world war. During the post-war years, she relentlessly pursued Nazis who escaped justice and also hunted down influential Russian targets she never assassinated during the war. The story takes place in different locations, including Germany, Lithuania, Russia, England, and Spain.

Some different threads and characters gradually connect, which may prove challenging for a few readers; hence, paying attention to every detail is important to understand the twists and turns that quickly unfold. Young Michael Fitzgerald, a gifted chess player who wins a spot at King’s College in Cambridge, meets Russian Yulia Forsheva in a London competition and falls in love with her.

When it is believed that Yulia’s father, Sergei, has turned traitor, Anna, her strong mother, finds her situation far more perilous. The Romeo and Juliet love affair is facilitated by Vassily, a skilled spymaster caught up in the factionalism, intrigue, and plotting to go on inside the Politburo, as well as the lethal European aspirations of Maxim Karpov. Can the devastation of a European tragedy be avoided? It is the suspenseful Valencian climax to the narrative’s linking sections.

Although the plot is extremely complicated and requires some patience initially, Worrall skillfully and methodically weaves his different threads into an engaging whole brought together in a succession of breathtaking finales in Sweden, London, and Spain. As the parallel narratives in 1961 and 1944 come to violent ends and Worrall gives some unexpected final twists, the novel’s second half is very gripping. Like Tom Bradby’s novel Yesterday’s Spy, The Partisan is intriguing and accurately depicts several historical events. It’s also a true portrayal of the horrors and brutality of war and the Soviet Union during the cold war.

The Partisan is a standard Cold War story regarding chess’s importance to the plot. Readers’ desire for the protagonists to stop the potential nuclear disaster or for the tension to generally increase is unaffected by the knowledge that it did not occur. And even though some of the action-packed moments are a tad muddy, this thriller is still highly captivating overall.