""A master thriller and a remarkable portrait of a twisted character." --Time"
For Arthur Rowe, the trip to the charity fete was a joyful step back into adolescence, a chance to forget the nightmare of the Blitz and the aching guilt of having mercifully murdered his sick wife. He was surviving [...]
Salonika, 1940. To the bustle of tavernas and the smell of hashish, a secret war is taking shape. In the backrooms of barbers, envelopes change hands, and in the Club de Salonique the air is thick with whispers. Costa Zannis is the city's dashing chief detective - a man with contacts high and low, i[...]
In 1938 Paris, Nicholas Morath, a Hungarian aristocrat and charismatic former cavalry officer, is recruited by his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, to try to bring down the Hungarian fascists, as Europe moves ever closer to all-out war under the shadow of Hitler and the Nazi war machine. Reader's Guide i[...]
Paris. Autumn, 1941. In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the French resistance is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: all partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines - from Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris [...]
Here is an extraordinary collection of the world's best literary espionage, selected by Alan Furst, a contemporary master of the genre. The Book of Spies brings us the aristocratic intrigues of The Scarlet Pimpernel, in which French emigres duel with Robespierre's secret service; the savage politica[...]
Paris, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague, 1937. In the back alleys of nighttime Europe, war is already under way. André Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars and a foreign correspondent for Pravda, is co-opted by the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and becomes a [...]
After his brother is murdered by Bulgarian fascists in 1934, Khristo Stoianev is recruited by the Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD, trained in Moscow, and sent to Spain to serve Russian interests in the Spanish Civil War. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.[...]
By 1939, thousands of Italian intellectuals, teachers and lawyers, journalists and scientists, had fled Mussolini's fascist government and found refuge in Paris. There, amidst the poverty and difficulty of emigre life, they joined the Italian resistance, founding an underground press that smuggled [...]
May 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter steams up the Tagus river to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the Santa Rosa, flies the flag of neutral Spain, and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmo. But she i[...]
September, 1939. The invading Germans blaze a trail of destruction across Poland. France and Britain declare war, but do nothing to help. And a Polish resistance movement takes shape under the shadow of occupation, enlisting those willing to risk death in the struggle for their nation's survival. Am[...]
Paris, 1938. Nicholas Morath, former Hungarian cavalry officer, returns home to his young mistress in the 7th arrondissement. He's been in Vienna where, amid the mobs screaming for Hitler, he's done a quiet favour for his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi. Polanyi is a diplomat and, desperate to stop his c[...]
An Autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers' bar in the city's factory district, he will meet with the military attache from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So [...]
Andre Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars, is a journalist working for Pravda in 1937. War in Europe is already underway and Szara is co-opted to join the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence agency. He does his best to survive the tango of pre-war politics by calmly obe[...]
Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin's purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night [...]
Set in the underworld of Paris in 1941. Reluctant spy Jean Casson returns to occupied Paris under a new identity. He is wanted by the Gestapo therefore must stay away from the civilised circles he knew as a film producer and learn to survive in the shadowy backstreets and cheap hotels of Pigalle. Ye[...]
Paris 1940. The civilised, upper-class life of film producer Jean Casson ends with the German occupation of the city. Out of money and almost out of luck, Casson attempts to work with a German film company but finds himself drawn into the dark world of espionage and double agents. More used to evadi[...]
Frederic Stahl, born of Viennese intelligentsia, ran away to sea at the age of seventeen. Embarking in America, his matinee idol looks and Old-World charm took him to Hollywood, and a life of movies and women. But by autumn 1939, the unease in Europe has spread even to Stahl's glamorous enclave. War[...]
In 1941, E. M. DeHaan, the captain of the Noordendam, a Dutch tramp freighter, is recruited by the Dutch Naval Intelligence Section for a series of dangerous secret missions against the Germans that take the ship and its crew behind enemy lines in Europe and North Africa, disguised as a neutral Span[...]
From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls "America's preeminent spy novelist," comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom-the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin.[...]
In 1940, Russian émigré journalist I. A. Serebin is recruited by the British secret service to take part in a desperate operation to prevent Hitler's conquest of Europe by stopping the export of Romanian oil to Germany. By the author of Kingdom of Shadows. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.[...]
NOW A MINISERIES ON BBC AMERICA STARRING DAVID TENNANT
War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, in Warsaw, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated h[...]
"A master spy novelist."--"The Wall Street Journal"
"Page after page is dazzling."--James Patterson
"NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER
Late summer, 1938. Hollywood film star Fredric Stahl is on his way to Paris to make a movie. The Nazis know he's coming--a secret bureau within the Reich has be[...]
"NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLER
Paris, 1938. As the shadow of war darkens Europe, democratic forces on the Continent struggle against fascism and communism, while in Spain the war has already begun. Alan Furst, whom Vince Flynn has called "the most talented espionage novelist of our generation," now[...]