Alan Furst

Andre Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars, is a journalist working for Pravda in 1937. War in Europe is already underway, and Szara is co-opted to join the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence agency. He does his best to survive the tango of pre-war politics by calmly obeying orders and keeping his nose clean. But...

Frederic Stahl, a Hollywood film star, travels from Beverly Hills to the boulevards of Paris. It is a dangerous, difficult, seductive time: Europe is about to explode, and the Parisians are living every night as though it were their last. As filming progresses, Stahl is drawn into a clandestine world of foreign correspondents, embassy officials, and spies of every sort....

Salonika, 1940. To the bustle of tavernas and the smell of hashish, a secret war is taking shape. In the back rooms of barbers, envelopes change hands, and in the Club de Salonique, the air is thick with whispers. Costa Zannis is the city's dashing chief detective - a man with contacts high and low, in the Balkans and beyond....

'Complex, intelligent, hugely intriguing - Alan Furst is in a class of his own' - William Boyd 'Furst's ability to recreate the terrors of espionage is matchless' - Robert Harris 'Furst never stops astounding me' - Tom Hanks Chosen as one of the 50 Best Modern Crime Novels by Marcel Berlins, crime reviewer, THE TIMES Bulgaria, 1934. Khristo Stoianev sees...

In September 1939, the invading Germans blaze a trail of destruction across Poland. France and Britain declare war, but do nothing to help. A Polish resistance movement takes shape under the shadow of occupation, enlisting those willing to risk death in the struggle for their nation's survival. Among them is Captain Alexander de Milja, an officer in the Polish military...

Paris, 1938. Democratic forces are locked in struggle as the shadow of war edges over Europe. Cristian 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...

Paris, 1938. Nicholas Morath, former Hungarian cavalry officer, returns home to his young mistress in the 7th arrondissement. He's been in Vienna where, amid the mobs screaming for Hitler, he's done a quiet favour for his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi. Polanyi is a diplomat and, desperate to stop his country's drift into alliance with Nazi Germany, he trades in conspiracy...

Spring, 1941. Britain is losing the war. 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,...

An Autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers' bar in the city's factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies Of Warsaw, with war coming to Europe...

Set in the underworld of Paris in 1941. Reluctant spy Jean Casson returns to occupied Paris under a new identity. He is wanted by the Gestapo, therefore he must stay away from the civilised circles he knew as a film producer and learn to survive in the shadowy backstreets and cheap hotels of Pigalle. Yet as the war drags on,...

May 1941. At four in the morning, a rust-streaked tramp freighter steams up the Tagus river to dock at the port of Lisbon. She is the Santa Rosa, flies the flag of neutral Spain and is in Lisbon to load cork oak, tinned sardines and drums of cooking oil bound for the Baltic port of Malmo. But she is not...

TIMES THRILLER OF THE MONTH: 'MAGNIFICENT' FURST IS IN A CLASS OF HIS OWN - William Boyd HIS ABILITY TO RECREATE THE TERRORS OF ESPIONAGE IS MATCHLESS - Robert Harris Under Occupation is set in occupied Paris in 1942, a dark, treacherous city now ruled by the German security services, where French resistance networks are working secretly to defeat Hitler....

By 1939, thousands of Italian intellectuals, teachers, 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. The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a...

Paris 1940. The civilised, upper-class life of film producer Jean Casson ends with the German occupation of the city. Out of money and almost out of luck, Casson attempts to work with a German film company but finds himself drawn into the dark world of espionage and double agents. More used to evading jealous husbands than the secret police, Casson...