In this novel about a woman who works in Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), author Simon Mawer focuses on Marian Sutro, a composite character representing the fifty-four women who served in France between May, 1941, and September, 1944. Of those real women, thirteen were murdered by the Germans following their capture. Recruited to perform extremely dangerous duties, all these women were fluent in French and often bilingual, and all of them were willing to perform under extraordinarily dangerous conditions. Marian’s work takes her throughout much of France, from the drop areas in the southwest to Paris. Everyone she meets is a potential enemy and a potential traitor, and she must operate on her own most of the time. “The danger of Paris is a cancer within you, invisible, imponderable, and probably incurable,” she notes. Many different factions with many different goals operate among the allies in France, and additional dangers from the police, French collaborators, and the Germans, make every moment a trial, especially in Paris. Like his more serious literary fiction, such as The Glass Room, The Fall, The Gospel of Judas, and Mendel’s Dwarf, Trapeze is full of excitement, but unlike those novels, this one is an entertainment, with a “Maisie Dobbs” quality – historically focused and fun to read but less serious stylistically and thematically than literary fiction.
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Set in Spain in 1941 during the rule of General Franco and the Falangists, with their connections to the Nazis, and again in 1981, in the run-up to the first real democratic elections, debut author Victor del Arbol creates a whirlwind of mysteries within mysteries that will keep even the most demanding reader entertained. Filling the novel with twists and turns, surprises, and action that doubles back on itself, the story line constantly changes, rewriting the information we think we already know, and creating new complications to ponder as we try to reconstruct what we think is happening. The interrelationships among the main characters and their families continue for the forty years of the time span, becoming ever more complex as motivations, betrayals, lies we have accepted as truth, and characters who are not who we think they are become central to the action.Complex and challenging in its plotting, the novel is also energetic and fast-paced. The characters are memorable, in part because none of them are perfect, and several are trapped into committing terrible acts because they believe they have no choice. The interrelationships between guilt, innocence, chance, and fate keep the reader engrossed, and though the violence is sometimes excessive and melodramatic, the author avoids neat “fictional packaging” in his ending. Fate rules.
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This dramatic and heart-stopping novel recreates very real events of shocking, unimaginable brutality which take place in Argentina in the fall of 1979, three years after the end of the Peronist democracy, and you will not forget these events. After the military seizes power, the characters, as real as you and I, and with the same goals and dreams, have no alternative but to go about their lives trying to maintain a low profile, and as the atrocities continue, they begin to affect these characters and the people they know and love. The novel becomes a revelation in which one cannot help but wonder, ultimately, how these atrocities were allowed to begin at all, and, even more importantly, how they were able to continue unimpeded within a country which was part of the Organization of American States. Rich with history, the novel is populated by a large and well developed cast of characters. The insights into the US position regarding the human rights abuses in these countries, and the secrecy with which they were treated are illuminating, as is the collusion of the Catholic Church in the abuses. An incredible achievement,
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While on their honeymoon in Venice in the late 1920s, Czech citizens Viktor and Liesl Landauer meet architect Rainer von Abt at a party given by an acquaintance in an ancient palazzo. The next day the architect shows them display models of the surprisingly dramatic buildings he has created, and after indicating that he has been a student of Adolf Loos, who has hailed from their Czech city (known here as Mesto), he extols “the virtues of glass and steel and concrete, and [decrying] the millstones of brick and stone that hang about people’s necks.” He continues, “I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.” Viktor is enthralled, suggesting, “Perhaps you could design a Glass Space (Glasraum) for us.” Focusing initially on the story of a great architectural achievement, the novel explores several stories of love and betrayal; stories of love sanctioned, illicit, and forbidden; and the fraught history of Czechoslovakia (and peripherally, Austria) between the wars. Though few exact dates are provided, the novel reflects the growth of the Nazi movement, the exodus of those Jews fortunate enough to have the means to escape, and the aftereffects on the Landauers, their household and on the Glass Room itself. Mawer’s prose is efficient and his style keeps the reader on pace, never having to stop to figure out what the author “really” means. Filled with vibrant imagery, both of the external and internal worlds of the characters, the novel has something for everyone.
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In this complex, challenging, and unconventional novel, Iraqi author Ali Bader takes on the ethnic and political history of the Middle East from 1926 – 2006 for his scope. An unnamed Iraqi writer has been asked by USA Today News to write an article about the murder of Kamal Medhat, an eighty-year-old Iraqi violinist whose body has recently been found. Kamal Medhat is one of three completely different identities and separate cultural backgrounds used by the same man, however, and the writer is hard pressed to follow the violinist’s trail as he moves through Iraq, Iran, Syria, Russia, and even Czechoslovakia. Author Ali Bader has long been fascinated with metaphysics and views of identity, and he uses the violinist’s three personas in direct parallel with the three personas used by Fernando Pessoa in his poetry book The Tobacco Shop, selections of which begin the novel and echo throughout. Carefully organized thematically, the novel is unconventional in style, and some confusion also results from the fact that the journalist “reports about,” instead of bringing a character to life the way one expects of fiction. Ultimately, the author writes a novel of broad import from a unique point of view. Different from the typical novel in style, this is very challenging but very rewarding.
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