Description
Book SynopsisA gripping and page-turning thriller that explores themes of power, information, secrecy and war in the twentieth century. From the author of the three-volume historical epic ''The Baroque Cycle'' and Seveneves.
In his legendary, sprawling masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.
In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - a mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to Detachment 2702, an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists. Some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt.
Their mission is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy''s fabled Enigma code. Waterhouse is flung into a cryptographic chess match against his German counterpart - one where every move determines the fate of thousands.
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Trade Review
Cryptonomicon, a novel of such ambition and intensity that most modern fiction looks timid and shallow in comparison... * Guardian *
Cryptonomicon was dauntingly vast: brilliant, splenetic, paranoid and beguiling in roughly equal measures... Stephenson's...thrilling fluency * TLS *
An audaciously conceived tale of code-making and code-breaking * New York Times *
A brilliant patchwork of codebreaking mathematicians and their descendants who are striving to create a data-haven in the Philippines...trust me on this one * Guardian *
Pynchon meets Gibson in the biggest novel of the season * Time Out *
