In The Fat of Fed Beasts, Ware played with metaphysics, crime and Beckett to produce a 'brilliant' intellectual comedy the Guardian picked as a 'paperback of the year'. Reconciliation plays similar tricks with the spy-thriller and the family saga, to greater emotional effect. It is February 2003, the run-up to the Iraq War. Holly Stanton's father gives her a typescript of the diary her grandfather, an MI6 spy, kept while on the run in occupied Norway. It's a story she has grown up with. Her partner, Martin, encourages her to write the book, but Holly is unwilling. In the family legend her grandfather was sailed to safety by a 'brave Norwegian'. Reading the diary, Holly is confronted by a real person, with a name, a family, and a life of his own before and after his role in her grandfather's story. She wonders what made him sacrifice his family, and what might have happened to them. sakriti opis