Greenmantle

by John Buchan

It is 1916. Major Richard Hannay and his fellow officer Sandy Arbuthnot are relaxing over breakfast at a big Hampshire country house, convalescing after some nasty scrapes at Loos and expecting presently to receive a battalion or perhaps a staff post. What arrives instead is a mission that leads them across the map of Europe, through wartime Germany and Austria to Istanbul and beyond. Their mission is to discover the source of unsettled rumblings of an Islamic revival and to prevent that revival from raising the Middle East against the Allies. A classic adventure yarn, well worth a fresh visit.