A Cage of Eagles is a 1989 thriller by James Follet, taking place at 1941 in the POW Camp at Grizedale Hall at England's Lake District

Lake District

The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth...

, where some of the most capable of the German officers captured by Britain were kept (and constantly plotted escape).

Plot introduction

The book centers on the battle of wits and the ambiguous relationship developing between U-boat

U-boat

U-boat is the anglicized version of the German word U-Boot , itself an abbreviation of Unterseeboot , and refers to military submarines operated by Germany, particularly in World War I and World War II...

 ace Otto Kruger, leader of the captured Germans, and Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming

Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...

 in his real-life WWII role as an intelligence officer which would later inspire the James Bond

James Bond

James Bond, code name 007, is a fictional character created in 1953 by writer Ian Fleming, who featured him in twelve novels and two short story collections. There have been a six other authors who wrote authorised Bond novels or novelizations after Fleming's death in 1964: Kingsley Amis,...

 books. It ends on December 1941, with an open-ended conclusion clearly leaving the possibility of a sequel.

Allusions to actual history

The camp depicted existed in reality, and much of the book is based on real-life information gathered by Follet in the course of writing an earlier book, the 1979 novel U-700.