The German Numbers Woman (Paperback, New edition)

Blind Howard, an ex-RAF veteran, possesses an acute sense of awareness, and can see almost better than the sighted. Morse code patterns his universe and keeps his mind turned to the big and sometimes bad world. Noble Laura, his doting wife, is loveliness personified.

Then Howard becomes acquainted with the nefarious Richard, and soon the idyll of his life with Laura starts to crack. Morse is the common denominator in the alliance. But before long, Howard and his world of dots and dashes, dits and dahs, takes on new darker horizons when he clicks into a drugs racket. Howard, the code-breaker, becomes Howard the buccaneer. He leaves lovely Laura for a wild voyage in search of a woman whose voice he has fallen in love with; and a sea-journey with maverick sailors on a heroin heist.

"There is so much to enjoy and commend in the novel. Sillitoe inhabits Howard's unseeing world with absolute conviction, providing a wealth of telling detail about a blind person's skilful negotiation of his everyday surroundings. Properly gripping."
SUNDAY TIMES

"Audacious and adventurous. The novel has all Sillitoe's characteristic virtues. He combines an exemplary craftsmanship with warmth, humour and sympathy. He has the great merit of always seeming to know where his characters are, what they are doing and thinking, when they are not on the page. And he is a compelling storyteller. He makes the fashionable novels of the generation that succeeded his – Amis junior, McEwan, Barnes, Rushdie – look flimsy, all more concerned with showing-off, peacock style, than with telling it how it is."
ALLAN MASSIE, 'The Scotsman'

"Sillitoe still effectively portrays the psychological idiosyncrasies of British reserve with chilling detail and a tender appreciation for obsessive loners."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY