A quiet dinner. An impossible request. A marriage that was never as safe as it looked.

Ahmed has spent seven years in London representing a country he still believes in, working toward the ambassadorship he promised himself as a boy. One phone call from a man named Medhat changes everything: an invitation to a "quiet dinner between friends," where Ahmed learns exactly what the service expects of a diplomat who wants to keep rising, and exactly what it expects from his wife.

What follows is not a spy story in the usual sense. It is the story of how a marriage, a faith, and a family are taken apart one reasonable sentence at a time, by a husband who once told his wife, kindly, that anything may be done for the country, and by a service that has been listening ever since.

In the Service of the Nation moves between a tense London restaurant, a Cairo sitting room ten years earlier, and the slow unraveling of a household that believes it still has choices. Suzi, once asked to give up something as small as a piece of black cloth, is asked now to give up far more, and discovers she had already agreed to it before anyone thought to ask her. Their daughter Nadine says a prayer at a kitchen table where no one else's faith is visible anymore, not knowing she has already been noticed.

Told in spare, exacting prose, this novella is about the machinery that makes ordinary people complicit in what they would never choose outright, and about the particular cruelty of a kindness that always, eventually, presents its bill.

For readers drawn to literary espionage fiction, and to novels that examine faith, power, and family under the pressure of an authoritarian state.