's Best of 2001
Penzler Pick, January 2001: The thrillers of Alan Furst usually take place in the dark days preceding World War II, but while the main participants in that war are of course portrayed, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States do not usually star in Furst's novels. He prefers instead to focus his stories on the citizens of those countries whose allegiances and roles in that particular theater of operations are much more contradictory and conflicted.

Kingdom of Shadows is set in Paris during 1938 and 1939. It is unclear at that time what the fate of Hungary will be if Hitler has his way, but a small group of expatriates would like to insure that events turn out in their country's favor. Nicholas Morath is an Hungarian aristocrat who fought bravely in the Great War. He is now part owner of an advertising agency in Paris, while his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, is a minor diplomat stationed in Paris. Polanyi calls on Nicholas to take part in missions against the Hungarian Fascists: carrying letters or bringing individuals back across the border in the course of his business trips.

As Nicholas's dinner parties, business deals, and dalliances with his mistress start to take a back seat to the escalating crisis in Europe, his tasks become more complicated, dangerous, and bewildering to him. He knows far less than the reader, who understands that his actions will have far-reaching consequences even beyond the fate of Hungary. Nicholas just does what he can without the luxury of historic hindsight.

Furst has fashioned here an elegant gem that vividly portrays the city of Paris during the last peaceful days of 1938 and the menace of Hitler's ambitions in the Sudetenland and beyond. Nicholas Morath is a charismatic and sympathetic figure who will come to understand, as the war progresses, the consequences, both good and bad, of his smallest actions during that turbulent time. --Otto Penzler


From Publishers Weekly
The desperation of "stateless" people trying to escape the Nazi redrawing of the European map in the late 1930s pervades Furst's (Night Soldiers; Red Gold, etc.) marvelous sixth espionage thriller. On a rainy night in 1938, the train from Budapest pulls into Paris bearing Nicholas Morath, a playboy Hungarian expatriate and sometime spy for his uncle, a wealthy Hungarian diplomat based in the French capital. Morath, a veteran hero of the Great War and a Parisian for many years, now finds himself forced to rely on former enemies to try to rescue Eastern European fugitives displaced by Hitler's aggression. His eclectic circle includes a Russian gangster, a pair of destitute but affable near-tramps, and a smooth-talking SS officer. Smuggling forged passports, military intelligence documents and cash through imminent war zones, Morath time and again returns in thankless triumph to the glittering salons of Paris. Furst expertly weaves Morath's apparently unconnected assignments into the web of a crucial 11th-hour international conspiracy to topple Hitler before all-out war engulfs Europe again, counterbalancing scenes of fascist-inspired chaos with the sounds, smells and anxieties of a world dancing on the edge of apocalypse. The novel is more than just a cloak-and-dagger thrill ride; it is a time machine, transporting readers directly into the dread period just before Europe plunged into its great Wagnerian g tterd mmerung. This is Furst's best book since The Polish Officer, and in it he proves himself once again a master of literary espionage. (Jan. 19) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Debonair Nicholas Morath, a Hungarian ?migr?, is living the high life in Paris until the Hungarian Resistance taps him to help counter Hitler's growing threat. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
"On the tenth of March 1938, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning." To readers of historical espionage fiction, that sentence can mean only one thing: Alan Furst. Furst writes about the years from 1938 to 1941 as if they were recurring characters, and over the course of five books, he has laid permanent claim to that period as his own. His latest tale concerns a Hungarian aristocrat, Nicholas Morath, who is living a life of easy indolence in prewar Paris. The only disturbance to his round of dinner parties and late-night romantic assignations is the occasional secret mission to Hungary at the behest of his diplomat uncle. Morath treats these forays more as familial obligation than as patriotic duty, but as Hitler's march across Europe continues, he finds himself slipping further into the shadow world of secret agents. What Furst does so convincingly--beyond the razor-sharp evocation of period and place--is capture the moral ambiguity at the heart of the lapsed cynics who are his heroes. Morath's commitment, like Jules Casson's in Red Gold (1999), is to individual rather than national values, even to hedonism rather than patriotism, yet he is pulled into the conflict anyway. Morath and Casson take tremendous risks, even act heroically, but they do it with a kind of tired resignation, as if an undertow were pulling them down. That's not to say they aren't romantic--you can't light a cigarette on a dark Paris street in 1938 without being romantic--but they are also utterly unsentimental. That is Furst's genius: he portrays what is perhaps the twentieth-century's most terrifying yet perversely romantic period without letting the romance turn the terror into sentimental goo. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

Our Review
The World at Night
Kingdom of Shadows is the sixth, stand-alone volume in Alan Furst's ongoing portrait of "the world at night": the cataclysmic 12-year period of Adolf Hitler's ascendancy. Following closely on the heels of 1999's Red Gold, an authoritative account of life in the French Resistance, Furst's latest is a compelling story of a world on the brink of war and a meticulously detailed re-creation of a vanished era.

Kingdom of Shadows begins in March of 1938 and ends during the summer of 1939, a period of uneasy "peace" in which national boundaries shift overnight, political alliances are forged and broken, anti-Semitic sentiments proliferate, and the armies of Europe mobilize for war. Significant events from this period -- all of them part of the fabric of this book -- include Hitler's annexation of Austria, the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the nonaggression pact between Stalin and Hitler, a pact that paves the way for the invasion of Poland and the formal beginning of the war.

Furst shows us these events from the partisan perspective of his deeply sympathetic hero, Nicholas Morath, a Hungarian aristocrat living in exile in Paris. Morath, on the surface, is an unlikely sort of hero. Part owner of a successful advertising agency, he cultivates the appearance of a bon vivant and ladies' man born to a life of privilege. Beneath that surface, he is a committed anti-Fascist, a decorated war hero, and a true descendant of his Magyar ancestors. Following the directives of his wealthy, enigmatic uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, Morath travels from his home in Paris to the trouble spots of Europe, gathering information, collecting money from anti-Nazi sympathizers, doing "favors" for influential friends, and putting himself repeatedly in harm's way.

Morath's adventures form the substance of this plotless, peripatetic novel, and they take him from the mountain fortresses of Czechoslovakia to a Romanian prison, from the aristocratic enclaves of Budapest to the decadent environs of Nazi-dominated Vienna. Together, they illuminate the changing face of a world sliding rapidly into chaos and night. They also illuminate the essential nature of Morath himself, a complex, romantic, thoroughly admirable figure who has dedicated his life to the destruction of National Socialism.

Furst has been compared to a great many writers -- Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, John le Carr￯﾿ﾽ -- but none of these comparisons seem particularly apt. Furst is very much his own man, and his six-volume cycle of war novels represents a unique achievement. At their best, as in Kingdom of Shadows, these books literally bring the past to life, resurrecting the sights, sounds, and tensions of a bygone world with passion, artistry, and scrupulous historical accuracy.

--Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has recently been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In spymaster Alan Furst's most electrifying thriller to date, Hungarian aristocrat Nicholas Morath—a hugely charismatic hero—becomes embroiled in a daring and perilous effort to halt the Nazi war machine in eastern Europe.

SYNOPSIS

In spymaster Alan Furst's most electrifying thriller to date, Hungarian aristocrat Nicholas Morath￯﾿ﾽa hugely charismatic hero￯﾿ﾽbecomes embroiled in a daring and perilous effort to halt the Nazi war machine in eastern Europe.


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM THE CRITICS

Washington Post Book World

Provides unqualified pleasure, highly recommended to anyone who enjoys elegant, sophisticated, suspenseful writing.

Boston Globe

Furst's most richly textured and, arguably, finest espionage novel.

New York Times

Furst’s writing has the seductive shimmer of an urbane black-and-white Hollywood classic.

Eugen Weber

Subtly spun, sensitive to nuances, generous with contemporary detail and information discreetly conveyed..It’s hard to overestimate Kingdom of Shadows.

Janet Maslin