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.
From the Hardcover edition.
From Barnes & Noble
Even before the outbreak of World War II, hundreds of Italian intellectuals and journalists fled to Paris to escape Mussolini's tyranny. As they formed resistance groups and founded clandestine newspapers, spies from nations friendly and hostile moved freely in their midst. Alan Furst's spy novel The Foreign Correspondent is set in this perilous period of transition. Title character Carlo Weisz doubles as a Reuters stringer and the editor of an underground antifascist newspaper. But even his cover job offers no security: In these dangerous times, any journalist is fair game.
Justin Ewers
Life in Europe, in other words, is grim. And in his new novel, The Foreign Correspondent, his ninth set in the gray dawn of World War II, Furst again proves himself a master at exposing how each taut nerve frays in anticipation of the conflicts to come … Like the stories of Graham Greene and John le Carre before him, Furst's yarn spins best in history's forgotten corners.
— The Washington Post
Janet Maslin
Carlo knows that he cannot publish such thoughts. But he must find covert ways — and here is where the true suspense of The Foreign Correspondent lies — of making sure that they find their way to the wider world.
— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Furst's reputation as one of today's best writers, in any genre, is further solidified by this gripping historical thriller with echoes of Graham Greene, which opens in Paris in December 1938. Journalist Carlo Weisz, an expatriate Italian who's half Slav, is fighting the Mussolini regime by writing for the Paris-based underground opposition newspaper, the Liberazione. When agents of the OVRA, the Italian secret police, murder the Liberazione's editor in the arms of his mistress, Weisz assumes greater responsibility for keeping the paper running. OVRA also targets Weisz and his surviving colleagues, forcing him to scramble to stay alive while continuing his subversive work. Furst (Night Soldiers) excels at characterization, making even secondary figures such as shadowy presences from British intelligence and Nazi minders more than cartoon stereotypes. Through the exploits of his understated hero, Furst presents a potent portrait of Europe on the eve of WWII. (June) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Forbes Magazine
History buffs, cloak-and-dagger fans and those who appreciate fine literature will find the novels of Alan Furst irresistible. No one else so granularly, graphically and dramatically recreates the atmosphere of prewar and early World War II Europe. His plots are gripping, his characters all too multidimensionally human. Yet his protagonists, when faced with the evils of totalitarianism, invariably rise above their feet of clay to do what has to be done. (9 Oct 2006)
—Steve Forbes
From The Critics
History buffs, cloak-and-dagger fans and those who appreciate fine literature will find the novels of Alan Furst irresistible. No one else so granularly, graphically and dramatically recreates the atmosphere of prewar and early World War II Europe. His plots are gripping, his characters all too multidimensionally human. Yet his protagonists, when faced with the evils of totalitarianism, invariably rise above their feet of clay to do what has to be done. (9 Oct 2006)
—Steve Forbes
Library Journal
Paris, 1939: foreign correspondent Carlo Weisz agrees to edit a clandestine journal opposing Italian fascism. He slips into Italy to recruit help, gets arrested but escapes. That, basically, is all there is to the plot of this superior thriller by the author of Kingdom of Shadows. Menace is everywhere in Furst's world: the man on the street corner outside one's apartment, the unanticipated interrogation by the police, the stranger who bothers the concierge. The protagonist commits himself, things happen, his attempts fail. Weisz's lover persuades him to smuggle information out of Nazi Germany. He asks her, "What you are doing? Will it really change anything?" "Who can say?" she replies. "What I do know is that if I don't do something, it will change me." Furst is virtuosic at setting scenes: "two shop girls in gray smocks, riding bicycles, an old man in a cafe, reading Le Figaro, his terrier curled up beneath the table, a musician on the corner, playing the clarinet, his upturned hat holding a few centimes." Furst's characters live in a gray world, confronted by monsters-and these monsters are winning. Strongly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/06.]-David Keymer, Modesto, CA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An Italian journalist joins forces with fellow expatriates in Paris to subvert the Fascist government at home, while he sinks into love with a German aristocrat. At ease again in the time and territory he has carved out for himself in such fine fashion, Furst (Dark Voyage, 2004; Blood of Victory, 2002) sets the stage here with a murder. The dapper, aging editor of Liberazione, a subversive newspaper published by anti-Mussolini intellectuals in France, is executed by a Fascist hit team while in the arms of his mistress. His job goes to Carlo Weisz, a half-German scribbler from Trieste who, like his colleagues, has fled for his life from the thugs who stole Italy in 1922. Weisz is, like all great Furst heroes, at first view anything but heroic. Fortyish and a loner, the Reuters reporter, newly returned from covering the Spanish Civil War, lives in seedy digs, dallying with a lovely Parisian he does not love, dining alone in neighborhood bistros, observing the coming catastrophe. The little newspaper to which he donates his time is his one effort to stick it to the criminals in power in Rome. Smuggled into Italy by a network of resistance workers, Liberazione is printed in Genoa under the noses of the authorities and distributed throughout the country by high-school girls. It is enough of an annoyance to the fascisti that the lives of all contributors are at risk, and Weisz, as editor, is first now on the hit list of OVRA, the nasty Italian organization hunting enemies of the state. He's also watched by interested British intelligence teams. An assignment to report events in Berlin reunites Weisz with old love Christa von Schirren, now married to a Prussian aristocrat. Christa is alsoinvolved with resistance efforts, perhaps even more dangerously than Weisz. As the great dark forces of the age close in on the couple, Weisz finds it necessary to strike a deal with those slippery Brits. Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is.
