Paperback of the week

Set in a near-future world riddled with justifiable paranoia about the creeping surveillance of ordinary citizens, David Shafer’s techno-thriller Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (the initials are no coincidence) is this close to being a truly excellent novel. Mixing passages of outstanding writing with plotting that occasionally acts as a dead weight, it’s a real curiosity of a book.

The story revolves around three very different people. The first to be introduced is Leila, an Iranian-American ...