The book has a foreword by M. R. D. Foot and contains information from her formerly secret personal Special Operations Executive (SOE) files, released in 2003.

As a result of her work on the book, Basu helped form the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust.

Spy Princess is a biography of Noor Inayat Khan, a descendant of Tipu Sultan, and the first woman radio operator to be infiltrated into occupied France during the Second World War.

In the foreword, Michael Foot writes that the book answers some questions as to why "an innocent like this" ended up in occupied France "at all".

[2] She was killed by the Nazis at Dachau concentration camp on 13 September 1944,[3] and was posthumously awarded at first the Croix de Guerre by France and later the George Cross by Britain.

[12] The 2020 reprint of the second edition has 10 chapters, preceded by a map of the Prospect circuits in France, a foreword by M. R. D. Foot, acknowledgements and an introduction.

Within a week, she was the only radio operator left in Paris, as members of her network fell to the Gestapo, mostly due to betrayal by double agents.

Determined to maintain communications between the Resistance and the SOE, she declined the opportunity to return to London, and continued to transmit messages, avoiding being captured while repeatedly changing her looks and locations.

Her work allowed safe passage of several SOE members, in addition to supplies of money and ammunition to the French Resistance.

[13] Later in the year it was reviewed in The Tribune by Khushwant Singh who wrote that the book "fills in gaps left in the earlier versions.