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The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel
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MSRP: $25.00
Your Price: $16.50
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Manufacturer: Random House
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The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel Features
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ISBN13: 9781400066025
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Additional The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel Information
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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 attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Times as “America’s preeminent spy novelist.”
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, the new military attaché, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations.
Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters–Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier’s brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed.
The Houston Chronicle has described Furst as “the greatest living writer of espionage fiction.” The Spies of Warsaw is his finest novel to date–the history precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel, exciting, atmospheric, erotic, and impossible to put down.
“As close to heaven as popular fiction can get.”
–Los Angeles Times, about The Foreign Correspondent
“What gleams on the surface in Furst’s books is his vivid, precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter-perfect re-creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway station.”
–Time
“A rich, deeply moving novel of suspense that is equal parts espionage thriller, European history and love story.”
–Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times, about Dark Star
“Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with immediacy.”
–Nancy Pate, Orlando Sentinel
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What Customers Say About The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel:
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Furst gives a satisfying intimacy to these events. This is a typical Furst historical spy thriller: Riveting, well-crafted and perfectly developed. He also brings chilling perspective to why WWII may have happened in the first place. I've read all Furst's other books and this ranks up there with the best. Like most of his books, this one foreshadows the cataclysmic events that are about to descend on Poland and the world as World War II. He makes you LIVE the times, with his unerring eye and ear for detail and setting. Really a well-done, very enjoyable book.
If I was informed I was about to be stuck in a massive snow storm for a week and could take only one writer's books with me, Furst would be that writer. Even if spy thrillers are not your thing, you should make an exception, here.Will someone please explain why he's not as big a household word as Dan Brown or James Patterson.
I believe this novel will appeal to those who are really into WW II minutiae and enjoy extensively researched books. Janet Maslin's blurb on the cover states," An incomparable expert at this game" referring I guess to Furst's attention to research and detail. It will be less appealing to the reader who is looking for excitement. I found that to definitely be true, but that said, the novel lacks much excitement of the type one would expect from a story of spies in pre WWII Europe. Things do happen,( even though the things don't happen until page 184, or so ), but my heart never started beating fast, and it certainly isn't a "page turner". As an aside, the cover of a couple embracing in what looks like a hotel lobby is intriguing. Of this book I'm afraid the thing I remember will be that cover.
While the pacing is slower than the typical thriller the story, as usual, is much more believable. Furst again delivers a tale set in pre WWII Poland. As always he gets you to care about the characters he creates. It was interesting to see that at the end of the novel he lets us know what happens to his characters. In some of the other novels you are left to wonder.
Alan Furst is one of my absolute favorite authors and The Spies of Warsaw is yet another terrific, prescient, insightful work of historical espionage fiction. His writing and the underlying research has sent me to read other authors that I've come to love, like Eric Ambler and the brilliant, nearly forgotten Joseph Roth. I consider Furst part of my intellectual education, as well as a literary treat.
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