Blood of Victory [Hardcover]

'Intensely romantic and nostalgic, but with a pounding, bullet-riddled climax on an icy river guaranteed to make your hair stand on end. Prime quality. Fiction to engage the heart and mind.'Philip Oakes, Literary Review 'Blood of Victory is the latest, magnificent addition to an oeuvre that oozes class at every pore...hugely entertaining and, in its portrait of a Europe gone mad, where ephemeral pleasures must be savoured to the hilt, extraordinarily poignant.'David Robson, Sunday Telegraph 'It is not the plots of his novels that set Furst above the competitors in his genre; it is a combination of the beautifully oblique writing and way in which he can produce a charged atmosphere with just a few sentences...How I envy anybody who has not yet discovered his writing.'Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph '...well written...absorbing...extremely readable.'TJ Binyon, Evening Standard 'Aware if the millions of words written about this period, he [Furst] wishes to add only those that are strictly necessary. The effect, rare in thriller fiction, is to leave you wanting more.'Mark Lawson, The Guardian '...Furst takes the reader to the back alleys abdglittering salons of 1940 with uniquely compelling authenticity.' CRIME TIME'Downbeat spy fiction that perfectly evokes a war-weary, double-crossing Bucharest. Ideal paternal Christmas giftage.' FHM '...Furst is careful to ensurethat not all loose ends are tied up: that, and the multi-layered characterisation of Serebin is another way in which the new novel has the kind of weightmore typical of fine literature than the thriller genre.'Barry Forshaw, Amazon 'Furst is not afraid to challenge the reader, and his radical reinvention of the espionage novel is the happy result of the authority and fastidiousness of his writing. The multi layered characterization of Serebin and the care Furst takes to ensure that not all loose ends are tied up give this novel thekind of weight more typical of literary fiction than the thriller genre.'Good Book Guide In the States it has reached no. 14 in the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists and no. 20 in the New York Times. 'Densely atmospheric and genuinely romantic, the novel is most reminiscent of the Hollywood films of the forties, when moral choices were rendered not in black-and-white but in smoky shades of gray.'The New Yorker 'He [Furst] glides gracefully into an urbane pre World War II Europe and describes that milieu with superb precision. The wry, sexy, melancholy of his observations would be seductive enough in its ownright - he is the Leonard Cohen of the spy genre - even without the sharp political acuity that accompanies it.'New York Times 'Furst expresses the singular acuity of his historical vision in an exact, nearly telegraphic pose thatrelies heavily on sentence fragments and rapid-fire sequences of images to capture the extraordinary complexity of his characters' political and personalreality. His writing is eloquent in its factual, fatigued simplicity.'New York Times Book Review 'Blood of Victory is stunningly well researched, packed with historical detail and thick with atmosphere.'Time Out New York 'Furst has researched the historical background, as he always does, and the chronologyof four crowded winter months would be enough to keep us panting. But, though there are trysts and narrow escapes aplenty, Furst's settings matter more than politics, incidental intrigues more than international ones, social skirmishes more than armed encounters. Atmosphere is all, especially in spy thrillers, and Furst is a master atmosphere-spinner. Understated sentiment, deprecatory charm, digressions aplenty, more nuances than action, more subtlety thanslaughter, hints, nudges, whispers and incredible stories one would like to believe are the ingredients of his style. The recipe has worked before, and he

Odessa -- city of Jewish gangsters, birthplace of Trotsky and ace spy Sidney Reilly, a mixture of chicken markets and Palladian architecture. The story begins on a Black Sea freighter in the winter of 1940. A.A. Serebin, poet and journalist, is on his way to Istanbul to effect the release of a former lover. The novel brings Serebin and his protector, police officer Ascher Levitch, into contact with a foreign espionage network centred in the Russian emigre communities of Paris, Berlin and Belgrade, as well as in Odessa itself. BLOOD OF VICTORY is a panoramic novel, moving between Istanbul, Bucharest, Paris, Sofia and the Black Sea coast, involving Turkish secret police, Russian chekhists, French aristocrats, Roumanian millionaires, Polish exiles and British spies. It is Alan Furst at his uniquely brilliant best. 'Furst's ability to recreate the terrors of espionage is matchless' -- Robert Harris 'Nothing can be like watching CASABLANCA for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years' -- Time