The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel
by Alan Furst
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alan FurstEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-06-03
ISBN: 1400066026
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel
Book Review: A sleek spy novel, largely devoid of violence, tho not of tension
Summary: 5 Stars
Following in the wake of Ambler and Le Carre's early spy novels, Alan Furst's latest novel confirms him as the finest spy writer now on the scene. This tale focuses on a Warsaw based French diplomat who uncovers in 1937 the Nazis' tank buildup to invade Russia and then their tactic to attack France through the Ardennes Forest. Furst, a master of brevity and nuance, uses subtlety and polish to carry his story. A nervous spy's impatience is the tick tock of the conductor's watch, the knock knock beat of a waiting train. Characters are etched in fine detail; a German's contact has "a prominent bulbous nose, the bulb divided at the tip;" a suddenly awakened lover has "the delicately wicked face of anticipation." His hero reads Stendhal's the Red and the Black, describing it as very nearly a spy novel and has in his suitcase a Simenon roman policier. Furst's authenticity is so sound, one need not check its title and date; it just is. Furst's last book involved an North Sea adventure with a Danish captain, before that a radical Italian newspaper publisher and before that a Parisian film producer all fighting the Fascists in Europe. Each September, a new novel is published and the fans of Alan Furst gobble them up. They are fine addictions.
Summary of The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel
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 attach? 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 attach?, 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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