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.
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Booklist - Bill Ott
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