I wasn’t entirely sure about this when I read the first look, but thought it had promise. It didn’t really fulfil it. The Diplomat’s wife starts off with a familiar premise; unconventional granny with an ‘interesting’ past wishes to revisit it and implausibly contrives to have her 18 year old grandson go with her. This is 1979, the Berlin Wall has not fallen and grandson, Phil, has been approached by someone from one of ‘ those’ services. We soon learn that Granny Emma is terminally ill and wants to tell her life story to someone before she dies – plus she needs a driver and someone to lean on (literally). Wind back to 1936 and Emma is about to meet her future husband and join him in Paris. There then follows a convoluted story of spies and betrayals of both the political and emotional kind. It seems a very odd and old fashioned novel to be reading in 2020 - sub Le Carré but without the intelligence ( as it were). It had its moments and it certainly rattled along in an undemanding kind of way. I became quite uninterested in the fate of all of them and found the 18-year-old Phil quite unconvincing and stunningly naive. The conclusion was particularly laughable as if the author had got fed up with it too and just wanted it to end