What would it take to make you betray your country?

Lies. Pursuit. Treachery. An atmospheric story of youthful idealism, great causes and greater betrayals in the British spy tradition of John Le Carre and Graham Greene.

Oxford, 1932. Verity Trenchard, daughter of a rigid and old-fashioned English clergyman, begins her studies at Grace College among the dreaming spires of Oxford University, tasting the air of freedom after a cold and joyless childhood. Arriving with her are Lady Claudia Vere, her impulsive aristocratic cousin, and Lally Brown, the level-headed daughter of a U.S. senator.
For these best and brightest of their generation, Oxford is a glittering mirage of parties, balls, and adventures, but Verity and Claudia soon see another world underneath. Verity, rejecting her father's oppressive piety, forms a close friendship with the fiery Communist Alfred Gore, and devotes herself to the struggle against the rising shadow of Fascism. Claudia is seduced by the suave, commanding presence of the pro-German academic John Petrus, who has gathering around him a brilliant intellectual circle.
But neither cause is what it seems, and both are deadly. Trapped by her own actions in a web of manipulation, treachery, and murder, Verity's path takes her on the wrong side of treason, into a world of faceless men where no-one can be trusted, and where every step on the road takes her deeper into guilt â€" and further from freedom.
In a final attempt to break free on the eve of war, Verity books passage on a liner to India. But old acquaintances and Russian agents alike are on her trail, forcing her to a desperate course of action to save what remains of her innocence â€" and her country's.

Voyage of Innocence is a tense, layered and evocative story of idealism, betrayal and forgiveness in the dark valley of the 1930s.