Dark Star

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

'Imagine discovering an unscreened espionage thriller from the late 1930s, a classic black-and-white movie that captures the murky allegiances and moral ambiguity of Europe on the brink of war . . . Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.' Time 'The time-frame of the late 1930s on the continent was once the special property of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene: Furst has ventured into their fictional territory and brought out a story that is equally original and engaging.' New York Times 'Espionage oozing from every shadow - writing of a high calibre.' Sunday Express 'Mesmerising.' Sunday Telegraph 'A jewel.' Daily Mail

UK Kirkus review

In the late autumn of 1937 Andre Szara, foreign correspondent for the newspaper Pravda, finds himself in Ostend doing a piece on the struggle of Belgian dockworkers to improve their working conditions. It is standard run-of-the-mill if not mundane stuff were it not that Szara has taken on a simultaneous assignment of a slightly less routine nature. As a Polish Jew or, more precisely, a Soviet Boshevik Jew of Polish origin, Szara's life has to date been a tightrope walk between his work as a reporter and seeker of truth and his awareness that one step in the wrong direction could lead to his instant liquidation. He has survived Polish pogroms, he has survived the Stalinist purges, the last of which shuddered to a halt in 1936 taking not just politicians and Stalin's opposition but more than a few journalists with it. Now another has started and what at first seemed to be merely a harmless little favour Szara agreed to perform for an intelligence operative suddenly starts to look anything but innocuous. Against a background of Nazi expansionism and Hitler's rantings, the great melting pot of European turbulence is bubbling up to boiling point. And no matter how hard he tries to extricate himself, Szara is going to be sucked into the maelstrom. A classic spy/espionage thriller in the grand tradition of Erskine Childers's Riddle of the Sands, this is Alan Furst's second book in what has since proved to be a successful and highly acclaimed series. Atmospheric, taut and intricately plotted, this novel owes its murky realism to Furst's considerable experience travelling as a journalist in Eastern Europe and Russia. In an afterword Furst claims that his story is based on truth, thus adding an even darker dimension to an already bleak and uncompromising evocation of 1930s Europe. (Kirkus UK)