‘Magnificent’ Sunday Times
‘Gripping… the twists and intrigue keep coming’ Observer
‘As ever, Furst vividly evokes a sense of time and place’ Mail on Sunday (Must-Read Books of the Year)

Occupied Paris, 1942.
In the dark, treacherous city, the German occupying forces are everywhere-and so are French resistance fighters, working secretly to defeat Hitler.

Just before he dies, a man being chased by the Gestapo hands off a strange-looking document to the unsuspecting novelist Paul Ricard. It looks like a blueprint of a part for a military weapon – one that might have important information for the Allied forces – and Ricard realizes he must try to get it into the hands of members of the resistance network.

As he finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into anti-German efforts, Ricard travels deep into enemy territory and along the escape routes of underground resistance safe houses, spying on Nazi maneuvers. And when he meets the mysterious and beautiful Leila, a professional spy, they begin to work together to get crucial information out of France and into the hands of the Allied forces in London.

ALAN FURST – The master of the historical spy novel
‘Alan Furst is in a class of his own’ William Boyd
‘Furst is an addiction’ The Times
‘If you are a John le Carre’ fan, this is definitely for you’ James Patterson
‘Furst’s ability to recreate the terrors of espionage is matchless’ Robert Harris
‘America’s preeminent spy novelist’ New York Times
‘Furst never stops astounding me’ Tom Hanks
‘How I envy anybody who has not yet discovered Furst’s writing’ Telegraph

Bulgaria, 1934. Khristo Stoianev sees his brother kicked to death by a gang of fascist thugs. Taking a risk on the promise of Communism, he flees to Moscow and is trained as an agent of the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service. His first mission is to go to Catalonia, where he is soon caught up in the bloody horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin’s purges, Khristo must again take flight, this time to Paris, where he is a small player on the wrong end of a social scene that is simultaneously decadent and doomed.

One of the twentieth century’s greatest spy novels, Night Soldiers is a thrilling portrait of one man’s extraordinary adventures and of Europe teetering on the brink of the Second World War.

‘Alan Furst’s mastery of the espionage novel puts him beyond any would-be rival’ Literary Review
‘A spy novel, a war story, an adventure, a survivor’s tale – Night Soldiers is all this and more’ Seattle Times

Paris is occupied by the Nazis, dark and silent at night. But when the clouds part, and moonlight floods the city, a Resistance leader called Mathieu steps out to begin his work.

The fighters of the French Resistance are determined not to give up. These courageous men and women – young and old, aristocrats and nightclub owners, teachers and students – help downed British airmen reach the border with Spain. In farmhouses and rural churches, in secret hotels, and on the streets, they risk everything to open Europe’s sealed doors and lead Allied fighters to freedom.

But as the military police heightens surveillance, Mathieu and his team face a new threat, dispatched from the Reich to destroy them all.

Cristián Ferrar, a handsome Spanish lawyer in Paris, is approached to help a clandestine agency supply weapons to beleaguered Republican forces. He agrees, putting his life on the line.

Joining Ferrar in his mission is an unlikely group of allies: idealists and gangsters, arms dealers, aristocrats and spies. From libertine nightclubs in Paris to shady bars by the docks in Gdansk, Furst paints a spell-binding portrait of a continent marching into a nightmare – and the heroes and heroines who fought back.

Frederic Stahl, born of Viennese intelligentsia, ran away to sea at the age of seventeen. Embarking in America, his matinee idol looks and Old-World charm took him to Hollywood, and a life of movies and women.

But by autumn 1939, the unease in Europe has spread even to Stahl’s glamorous enclave. War has been declared, and though bullets and bombs are yet to fly, his decision to shoot a film in Paris seems ill-advised. The Parisians know this is their last spring and a time to be passionate.

Soon after his arrival, Stahl is drawn into a clandestine world of foreign correspondents, exiled Spanish republicans and, of course, spies of every sort. For as a celebrity from neutral America – who can travel across the continent freely – Stahl could be very useful indeed … Returning to the Brasserie Heiniger, and some of the colourful cast from THE WORLD AT NIGHT, this is a headily atmospheric portrait of a continent in the grip of The Phony War.

Beginning with a daring operation to smuggle the Polish National Gold Reserve to the government in exile, he slips into the shadowy and treacherous front lines of espionage; he moves through Europe, changing identities and staying one step ahead of capture. In Warsaw, he engineers a subversive campaign to strengthen the people’s will to resist. In Paris, he poses as a Russian poet, then as a Slovakian coal merchant, drinking champagne in black-market bistros with Nazis while uncovering information about German battle plans. And a love affair with a woman of the French Resistance leads him to make the greatest decision of his life.

By 1939, thousands of Italian intellectuals, teachers and lawyers, journalists and scientists, had fled Mussolini’s fascist government and found refuge in Paris. There, amidst the poverty and difficulty of émigré life, they joined the Italian resistance, founding an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to their lost homeland.
In Paris, in the winter of 1939, a murder/suicide at a lovers’ hotel hits the tabloid press. But this is not a romantic tragedy, it is the work of OVRA, Mussolini’s fascist secret police, and meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine newspaper published by Italian émigrés. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and found work as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor.

Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the tragic end of the Spanish civil war, but, as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Surete, by agents of 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 anti-fascists — 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 the woman who becomes the love of his Weisz’s life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin, at the heart of Hitler’s Nazi empire.