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 A Novel
by Alan Furst
Hardcover: May 2006,
288 pages.
Paperback: May 2007,
288 pages.
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.
Library Journal
Furst's characters live in a gray world, confronted by monsters-and these monsters are winning.
Kirkus
Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is.
Publishers Weekly
Furst's reputation as one of today's best writers, in any genre, is further solidified by this gripping historical thriller
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.
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.
Alan Furst
has been compared to Graham
Greene and Eric Ambler, and is
considered by many to be the
master of the historical spy
novel. He is the author of
Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The
Polish Officer, The World at
Night, Red Gold, Kingdom
of Shadows and The
Foreign Correspondent.
Furst describes the area of his
interest as "near history." His
novels are set between 1933 and 1945, from Adolf Hitler's ascent, with the first Stalinist purges in Moscow coming a year later, to the end of the war in Europe. Because the history of this period is so well documented, Furst has ample access to books by journalists of the time, personal memoirs, autobiographies (many of the prominent individuals of the period wrote an autobiography), war and political histories, and characteristic novels written during those years.
Set in the weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dr. Rudi Rosenharte, formerly a Stasi foreign agent, is sent to Trieste to rendezvous with his old lover and agent, Annalise Schering. The problem: Rudi knows she’s dead.
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Booklist - Bill Ott
