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The Foreign Correspondent: Summary and book reviews of The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst, plus links to an excerpt from The Foreign Correspondent and a biography of Alan Furst.

The Foreign Correspondent

The Foreign Correspondent
A Novel
by Alan Furst
Hardcover: May 2006,
288 pages.
Paperback: May 2007,
288 pages.

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Critics' Opinion:   good
Readers' Rating:  Not Rated
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BOOK SUMMARY

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. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts’ passion to fight in the war against tyranny.

By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini’s fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of émigré life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story.

Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers’ hotel. But this is no romantic traged–it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini’s fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine émigré newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor.
Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Sûreté, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder.

The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as “Colonel Ferrara,” who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz’s life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin.

The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best–taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.

BOOK REVIEWS

Media Reviews

Good  Library Journal
Furst's characters live in a gray world, confronted by monsters-and these monsters are winning.

Good  Kirkus
Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is.

Good  Publishers Weekly
Furst's reputation as one of today's best writers, in any genre, is further solidified by this gripping historical thriller

Very Good  Booklist - Bill Ott
Starred Review. Furst serves another delicious helping of Paris suspended in a brief moment of time when everyone waited for something to happen, good or bad.

Very Good  The Globe & Mail
Smart enough and light enough and nothing you'd be embarrassed to be caught with on a blanket; in other words, just what you need in a beach date.

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