by Alan Furst (Author)
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 begins The Spies of Warsaw, with war coming to Europe, and French and German operatives locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn in to 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, amidst an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters -- Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence, last seen in Furst's The Polish Officer; the mysterious and sophisticated Doctor 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 Spies of Warsaw is Alan Furst's finest novel to date -- the history is precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel -- exciting, atmospheric, erotic and impossible to put down.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Edition: 1ST
Publisher: W&N
Published: 10 Jul 2008
ISBN 10: 0297855417
ISBN 13: 9780297855415
Book Overview: The Foreign Correspondent (November 2006) has sold over 40,000 copies in hardback and paperback to date. Alan Furst's profile and popularity has increased dramatically over the past year, with a large increase in sales, as well as more popular UK press coverage, most notably a feature in the December issue of Vanity Fair magazine, which included other high-profile authors such as Henry Porter and P.D. James.