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  • Published: 17 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529111293
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $35.00

Victoire

A Wartime Story of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal




An incredible story of heroism, complicity and survival about a charismatic double-agent who played a major role in World War Two - Agent Victoire.

'The wartime spy career of Mathilde Carré - aka "the Cat" and "Agent Victoire" - is so extraordinary it almost defies belief' The Times
An exhilarating true story of espionage, resistance, and one of WW2's most charismatic double-agents.

Occupied Paris, 1940. A woman in a red hat and a black fur coat hurries down a side-street. She is Mathilde Carré, codenamed 'the Cat', later known as Agent Victoire - charismatic, daring and a spy.

These are the darkest days for France, yet Mathilde is driven by a sense of destiny that she will be her nation's saviour. Soon, she is at the centre of the first great Allied intelligence network of the Second World War.

But as Roland Philipps shows in this extraordinary account of her life, when the Germans close in, Mathilde makes a desperate and dangerous compromise. Nobody - not her German handler, nor the Resistance and the British - can be certain where her allegiances now lie...

'A truly astonishing story, meticulously and brilliantly told' Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline

'Gripping... Enough plot twists and moral ambiguity to satisfy any spy novelist' Spectator

  • Published: 17 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9781529111293
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Roland Philipps

Roland Philipps went into publishing on graduating from Cambridge and until recently was Publisher of John Murray. He has edited some leading novelists, politicians, historians, travellers and biographers. A Spy Named Orphan, his first book, arises from lifelong connections to Donald Maclean and his story.

Also by Roland Philipps

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Praise for Victoire

What a read! What a fascinating character! I was gripped from the first page to the last. A truly astonishing story, meticulously and brilliantly told

Philippe Sands, author of The Ratline

A wonderful, atmospheric book: a miraculous portrait of a flawed human being, and a masterful account of the moral quagmire of wartime France and Britain

Carmen Callil, author of Bad Faith

Roland Philipps tells Victoire's story with skill and compassion, and reveals that for all her betrayals, she deserves more understanding than she received in her lifetime

Artemis Cooper, author of Patrick Leigh Fermor

The wartime spy career of Mathilde Carré - aka 'the Cat' and 'Agent Victoire' - is so extraordinary it almost defies belief

The Times

Enough plot twists and moral ambiguity to satisfy any spy novelist ... At its heart this is a book about the moral dilemmas involved in living under the perverting conditions of war and occupation ... Philipps does a fine job of setting the scene inside France, and building up the tension in this increasingly gripping wartime story, and all that follows ... a deeply humane book

Clare Mulley, Spectator