NEWS

Posted on 7 May, 2026

With summer just around the corner, we were in the mood for some sun-soaked intrigue (à la Fleming) and the streaky blue shores adorning the cover of Alex Preston’s latest novel called out to us. So, introducing the James Bond Book Club’s May pick…  A Stranger in Corfu.

OVERVIEW

Set on the small Ionian island of Vidos, just off the coast of Corfu, A Stranger in Corfu blends espionage and mystery into an unusual and atmospheric novel. The island serves as a discreet refuge for former intelligence agents – a place where those who are no longer useful to MI6 are quietly sent to recover, retire or disappear.

Nina Wolfe, a young operative reeling from a failed mission in Bosnia and the trauma that followed, arrives to this strangely suspended island expecting rest and anonymity. Instead, she finds herself amongst a group of ageing spies whose pasts are anything but settled. When one of the island’s residents is found dead, the calm is fractured, and Nina is drawn into a web of long-buried secrets and unresolved betrayals.

The novel moves between past and present, exploring the lives that brought these agents to Vidos and the moral compromises that continue to haunt them. What begins as a story of recuperation becomes something far darker: a reckoning with the personal cost of a life lived in the shadows.

WHY WE CHOSE IT

A secluded island off Corfu, populated by former spies living out a quiet, watchful afterlife, feels entirely in keeping with the worlds inhabited by James Bond. It’s easy to imagine such a place existing just beyond the edges of a Bond novel: sunlit… beautiful… faintly menacing beneath the surface.

Ian Fleming had a gift for using location not just as backdrop but as atmosphere: exotic settings that heighten both the glamour and danger of espionage. Preston’s Vidos taps into that same tradition. Its idyllic isolation creates a sense of unease, where the past lingers and secrets feel inescapable, no matter how far one travels.

A Stranger in Corfu takes that familiar, Bond-like setting and turns it inward. Instead of high-octane missions, we’re given the aftermath – a cast of characters who might once have moved through those classic espionage landscapes, now confined to one of their own. The result is a novel that feels both evocative of the genre we love and intriguingly at odds with it.

THEMES TO CONSIDER

– The afterlife of espionage – What happens to spies when their usefulness ends? Is Vidos a refuge, a prison, or something in between?

– Memory and guilt – Many of the characters are shaped by past actions they cannot undo. How does the novel explore the psychological cost of those choices?

– Identity and reinvention – Can those who have lived under assumed identities ever truly know themselves – or start again?

REVIEWS

Tom Holland – ‘Le Carré meets The Durrells – A Stranger is Corfu is a brilliantly atmospheric thriller. Suspenseful, vivid and impossible to put down’

Vaseem Khan – ‘A beautifully written examination of what it means to put your life – and soul – on the line for a cause. A spy novel of the highest calibre’

Adam Rutherford – ‘Taut, tense and utterly gripping: Preston evokes a wonderfully thrilling story from the dreamy Ioanian. Nothing short of brilliant’

Evie Wyld – ‘A beautiful, taut novel laced with the thrills of lives half-lived and never escaped; of friendship, love and relentless betrayal beneath Corfu’s blazing sun and the restless, dark sea – where secrets threaten to drown them all. A story that haunts long after the last page’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Preston is an award-winning author of five novels including This Bleeding City, The Revelations, In Love and War and Winchelsea, as well as a book of non-fiction As Kingfishers Catch Fire. He writes regularly for the Economist and Harper’s Bazaar. He reviews books for the Observer’s New Review, Financial Times and Spectator. Alex is co-founder of the Corfu Literary Festival and Patron of Oxford Literary Festival.

We hope you enjoy A Stranger in Corfu. Follow our social channels for discussions, highlights, and more.