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| author's
works |
- Alan Furst is widely recognized as the master of the historical
spy novel. He is the author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The
Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, and Kingdom of Shadows.
Born in New York, he has lived for long periods in France, especially
Paris. Often compared to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, Alan Furst
is a master of the spy thriller and one of the great war novelists
of our time.
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The
Polish Officer |
September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain
Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service
of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national
gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest.
Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris,
in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the
frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an
attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the
shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery,
and betrayal... Read
more...
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Blood
of Victory |
In 1939, as the armies of Europe mobilized for war, the British
secret services undertook operations to impede the exportation
of Roumanian oil to Germany. They failed. Then, in the autumn
of 1940, they tried again.
So begins Blood of Victory, a novel rich with suspense, historical
insight, and the powerful narrative immediacy we have come to
expect from bestselling author Alan Furst. The book takes its
title from a speech given by a French senator at a conference
on petroleum in 1918: Oil, he said, the blood of the earth,
has become, in time of war, the blood of victory.
November 1940. The Russian writer I. A. Serebin arrives in Istanbul
by Black Sea freighter. Although he travels on behalf of an
émigré organization based in Paris, he is in flight from a dying
and corrupt Europe—specifically, from Nazi-occupied France.
Serebin finds himself facing his fifth war, but this time he
is an exile, a man without a country, and there is no army to
join. Still, in the words of Leon Trotsky, "You may not be interested
in war, but war is interested in you." Serebin is recruited for
an operation run by Count Janos Polanyi, a Hungarian master
spy now working for the British secret services.
The battle to cut Germany’s oil supply rages through the spy
haunts of the Balkans; from the Athenée Palace in Bucharest
to a whorehouse in Izmir; from an elegant yacht club in Istanbul
to the river docks of Belgrade; from a skating pond in St. Moritz
to the fogbound banks of the Danube; in sleazy nightclubs and
safe houses and nameless hotels; amid the street fighting of
a fascist civil war.
Blood of Victory is classic Alan Furst, combining remarkable
authenticity and atmosphere with the complexity and excitement
of an outstanding spy thriller. As Walter Shapiro of Time magazine
wrote, "Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first
time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years...." Read
more...
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Dark
Star |
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 full-time
spymaster in Paris. As deputy director of a Paris network, Szara
finds his own star rising when he recruits an agent in Berlin
who can supply crucial information. Dark Star captures not only
the intrigue and danger of clandestine life but the day-to-day
reality of what Soviet operatives call special work... Read
more...
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Red
Gold
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Autumn 1941: In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course
of the war 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 and deep in occupied France, Red
Gold moves with quiet menace as predators from the dark edge
of war—arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins—emerge from
the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean
Casson, once a well-to-do film producer, now a target of the
Gestapo living on a few francs a day. As the occupation tightens,
Casson is drawn into an ill-fated mission: running guns to combat
units of the French Communist Party. Reprisals are brutal. At
last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully re-creates
the shadow world of French resistance in the darkest days of
World War II... Read
more...
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The
World at Night |
Paris, 1940. The civilized, upper-class life of film producer
Jean Casson is derailed by the German occupation of Paris, but
Casson learns that with enough money, compromise, and connections,
one need not deny oneself the pleasures of Parisian life. Somewhere
inside Casson, though, is a stubborn romantic streak. When he’s
offered the chance to take part in an operation of the British
secret service, this idealism gives him the courage to say yes.
A simple mission, but it goes wrong, and Casson realizes he
must gamble everything—his career, the woman he loves, life
itself. Here is a brilliant re-creation of France—its spirit
in the moment of defeat, its valor in the moment of rebirth...
Read more...
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Night Soldiers
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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 Soldiers masterfully
re-creates the European world of 1934–45: the struggle between
Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last
desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla
operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers
is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand
scale... Read
more...
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Kingdom
of Shadows |
In spymaster Alan Furst's most electrifying thriller to date,
Hungarian aristocrat Nicholas Morath—a hugely charismatic hero—becomes
embroiled in a daring and perilous effort to halt the Nazi war
machine in eastern Europe... Read
more...
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| articles
and reviews |
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Review
of Alan Furst, Dark Star
- By Brad DeLong - Read why Mr. DeLong would recommend Alan Furst's
Dark Star novel to better understand the world before World War II.
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