Godliman and Bloggs realise what Faber is trying to achieve and chase him across Northern England and Scotland. Italian cover of the Eye of the Needle, Mondadori 1979. Realising that FUSAG being fake implies that the D-Day landings will be in Normandy rather than around Calais, Faber heads for Aberdeen, Scotland, where a U-boat will take him and his intelligence back to Germany. Several soldiers try to arrest him but he kills them with his stiletto. He takes photos and discovers it is a dummy and has merely been constructed to look real from the air. One identifies Faber from a photo of him as a young army officer.įaber is ordered by Berlin to investigate the First United States Army Group (FUSAG) military base. They then interview Faber's fellow tenants from 1940. They connect the landlady's murder to Faber by him having used his 'needle' during the transmission. They start with the interrupted broadcast and his codename Die Nadel. A history professor formerly acquainted with Faber, Godliman, and a widowed ex-policeman, Bloggs, are employed by MI5 to catch him. Lucy later gives birth to their son Jonathan ('Joe'), conceived just before the wedding, but their subsequent relationship remains celibate.įour years later, MI5 has executed or recruited all German spies in Britain except Faber. Unable to fly during the Battle of Britain, David grows embittered and he and Lucy retire to the isolated (fictitious) Storm Island off the east coast of Scotland. Garden will eventually realise that he was using a transmitter and that he is a spy, so he kills her with his stiletto, then resumes his transmission.ĭavid, a trainee RAF pilot, and his bride Lucy are on their honeymoon when they're involved in a car crash. Faber is halfway through radioing this information to Berlin when his widowed landlady stumbles into his room hoping for intimacy. In 1940, Henry Faber, a German spy nicknamed 'die Nadel' ('The Needle') due to his trademark weapon being a stiletto, is working at a London railway depot, collecting information on Allied troop movements. The book was made into a motion picture of the same title in 1981, starring Donald Sutherland, with a screenplay adapted by Stanley Mann and directed by Richard Marquand. The revised title is an allusion to the ' eye of a needle' aphorism. This novel was Follett's first successful, best-selling effort as a novelist, and it earned him the 1979 Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America.

It was originally published in 1978 by the Penguin Group under the title Storm Island. Eye of the Needle is a spy thriller novel written by Welsh author Ken Follett.

Ken follett eye of the needle summary