From Alan Furst, the author of such spy novels as Dark Star, Night Soldiers, and The Polish Officer, comes The World at Night. Set in Paris just following the fall of France to Germany in 1940, the book tracks film producer Jean Casson, a hard-core denizen of Paris nightlife. The Nazi occupation brings with it shortages, travel restrictions, and the petty humiliations of life under the German occupiers. But it offers Casson the chance for a comfortable life as a collaborator. Instead, he opts to take part in an ill-considered espionage plot, along the way rekindling an old and passionate romance with Citrine, a beautiful actress.


From Publishers Weekly
With uninspired plotting, Furst makes disappointing use of a vividly evoked wartime Paris in his latest WWII espionage novel (The Polish Officer; Dark Star; Night Soldiers). Hedonistic Parisian film producer Jean Casson thrives in Paris's active film industry, enjoying the colorful social scene, the posh restaurants and the beautiful, available women. But this world he knows so well all but disappears when Germans march into France and seize the city. At first, Casson strives merely to survive, but he's soon drawn into duty as an amateur intelligence operative and finds himself in a precarious position, buffeted by British Intelligence, resistance forces and the Gestapo. In the process, Casson discovers two powerful forces within himself?his patriotism and his consuming passion for an old lover, the beautiful actress Citrine. Furst brings this fascinating, historic Paris to life with his usual masterful use of period detail. But while Casson makes an intriguing protagonist, his relationships with other characters are presented rather schematically?in particular, his affair with Citrine, which ultimately proves so influential, is never satisfactorily developed. More importantly, Casson's career as a spy, marked by mixed success on missions that seem insignificant, is anticlimactic and a bit confusing. In the end, the novel never attains the dramatic pitch of Furst's recent The Polish Officer. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Jean-Claude Casson lives a hedonistic Paris existence as a low-budget film producer until the Germans invade France in 1940. Casson's need to continue working almost leads him into collaborating with the enemy. He is saved, temporarily, by the intervention of a group he thinks is British intelligence. He decides to work for the French Resistance only to have the Gestapo try to coerce him into betraying them. Furst, who has written several other World War II espionage tales, masterfully conveys a sense of daily life in occupied Paris, where even finding a newspaper was an ordeal. While the atmosphere is strong, Furst's storytelling skills are weak, shifting uneasily among the novel's many strands without always making the connections necessary for following the convoluted, often arbitrary, developments. The author also spends too much time on the producer's complicated love life, though he paints a vivid picture of the casualness of sexual relations in wartime. Stephen Thorne reads with a genteel English accent when a more earthy narration is called for. Recommended only for collections where Furst's works are popular.AMichael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times, Scott Veale
Mr. Furst is careful not to make too much of Casson's exploits outside the bedroom, portraying his spying as the reluctant and not fully understood actions of an Old World romantic. The World at Night is full of richly atmospheric detail ...


From AudioFile
A sincere Parisian filmmaker/boulevardier confronts the German occupation in the dark days of 1940 in this unintentionally silly book, full of stereotypes and pseudo-urbane Gallicisms such as, "You are always f-king ze girls, Jean-Claude." It is most suitable for the very unsophisticated listener, who won't catch the gaucheries, or the super-sophisticated, who will take pleasure in them. "I have a hotel keeper's view of ze world," one character philosophizes in discussing a movie star's apparent suicide, "continual disorder, chaos and stolen towels." The French accent is supplied by British narrator Stephen Thorne, whose Europeans seem to have stepped out of an MGM musical. Except for his lisp, he performs feelingly and sometimes hysterically in sync with ze text. Y.R. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
With deft texturing and tight storytelling, Furst puts film producer Jean Casson into perilously exciting jams in German-occupied Paris. Like most French, Jean Casson avoids the tentacles of collaboration as best one can. He revives his feature film business under German authority, an effort that reintroduces him to film industry figures who aren't what they now claim. Casson's first encounter with deception involves him in a tense train trip to Spain, at the behest, he thinks, of British intelligence, but the "agent" is unmasked as a freelancing scoundrel. Chastened, Casson resolves to keep to personal affairs, but then German intelligence intrudes, coercing him to spy on British airdrops to the French Resistance. Frightened, he calls on a relative's contacts with an authentic British agent, for whom Casson signs up to be doubled against the Germans. So complicated are Casson's problems, yet so clearly and cleverly constructed his extrications, that Furst never unnaturally forces solutions, demonstrating that he wields that authentic literariness essential to the better espionage titles. A successful, attention-holding effort. Gilbert Taylor


From Kirkus Reviews
The throes of masculine existential torment are an unquestionable specialty for Furst (The Polish Officer, 1995), whose WW II fiction combines so much broad historical erudition with such genuine humanity that they ought to be made required reading. Once again, Furst loads the entire burden of an aspect of the war on the shoulders of a single character, then scrutinizes that character as he changes. It's the old rat-in-the-maze game, played for very high stakes. Jean Casson, at the outset, is a slightly libertine, slightly dissolute, slightly bankrupt film producer with several moderately successful but unremarkable movies under his belt. Above all else, Casson is French, and above being French, he's Parisian. Though his tastes may be definitively bourgeois, his heart is restless, a condition typified by his extremely Gallic womanizing. On the verge of developing his first real hit--a project called Hotel Dorado--his life is shattered by the Nazi drive through Belgium and into Paris. Inhabiting an occupied city filled with repulsive Germans and ready collaborators, Casson's long-brewing crisis of purpose gets him embroiled in an elaborate double-cross that involves the British Secret Service, furtive trips to Spain and to the French countryside, and a host of shadowy minor characters, each perfectly captured in Furst's lacerating prose. A terrified, reluctant spy, Casson survives mainly on panache and dumb luck. There's plenty of sex amid the rubble of a wrecked Continent, but Casson's heart truly belongs to Citrine, the beautiful young actress who's set to star in Hotel Dorado. At times, the author seems more concerned with atmosphere than action, but fans will recognize his gift for making every gesture an expression of character and allow him to get away with it. The payoff is worth the wait. Furst has somehow discovered the perfect venue for uniting the European literary tragedy with the Anglo-American spy thriller. Nobody does it better. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
“First-rate research collaborates with first-rate imagination....Superb.”
—The Boston Globe

“[The World at Night] earns a comparison with the serious entertainments of Graham Greene and John le Carré....Gripping, beautifully detailed...an absorbing glimpse into the moral maze of espionage.”
—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

“[The World at Night] is the world of Eric Ambler, the pioneering British author of classic World War II espionage fiction....The novel is full of keen dialogue and witty commentary....[T]hrilling.”
—Herbert Mitgang, Chicago Tribune

“With the authority of solid research and a true fascination for his material, Mr. Furst makes idealism, heroism, and sacrifice believable and real.”
—David Walton, The Dallas Morning News


Review
?First-rate research collaborates with first-rate imagination....Superb.?
?The Boston Globe

?[The World at Night] earns a comparison with the serious entertainments of Graham Greene and John le Carré....Gripping, beautifully detailed...an absorbing glimpse into the moral maze of espionage.?
?Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

?[The World at Night] is the world of Eric Ambler, the pioneering British author of classic World War II espionage fiction....The novel is full of keen dialogue and witty commentary....[T]hrilling.?
?Herbert Mitgang, Chicago Tribune

?With the authority of solid research and a true fascination for his material, Mr. Furst makes idealism, heroism, and sacrifice believable and real.?
?David Walton, The Dallas Morning News


Book Description
Paris, 1940. The civilized, upper-class life of film producer Jean Casson is derailed by the German occupation of Paris, but Casson learns that with enough money, compromise, and connections, one need not deny oneself the pleasures of Parisian life. Somewhere inside Casson, though, is a stubborn romantic streak. When he’s offered the chance to take part in an operation of the British secret service, this idealism gives him the courage to say yes. A simple mission, but it goes wrong, and Casson realizes he must gamble everything—his career, the woman he loves, life itself. Here is a brilliant re-creation of France—its spirit in the moment of defeat, its valor in the moment of rebirth.


From the Publisher
'Furst is a master ... There is unlikely to be a more engrossing read this year. Just wonderful.' - BRIAN CASE, TIME OUT 'Casson is one of the best-drawn characters in recent fiction. The World at Night is a brilliant piece of atmospheric writing.' - HARTLAND, DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A wonderfully evocative picture of wartime Paris and the moral maze of resistance that builds to a brilliant climax.' - PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY, MAIL ON SUNDAY 'Highly atmospheric ... Furst has an eye and an ear for the feel of the in occupied Europe. The sights, sounds and are all authentic. A minor masterpiece.' - PETER MILLAR, THE TIMES 'Furst's ability to recreate the terrors of espionage is matchless.' - ROBERT HARRIS, DAILY MAIL 'In the world of the espionage thriller Furst is in a class of his own.' - WILLIAM BOYD


From the Inside Flap
Paris, 1940. The civilized, upper-class life of film producer Jean Casson is derailed by the German occupation of Paris, but Casson learns that with enough money, compromise, and connections, one need not deny oneself the pleasures of Parisian life. Somewhere inside Casson, though, is a stubborn romantic streak. When he’s offered the chance to take part in an operation of the British secret service, this idealism gives him the courage to say yes. A simple mission, but it goes wrong, and Casson realizes he must gamble everything—his career, the woman he loves, life itself. Here is a brilliant re-creation of France—its spirit in the moment of defeat, its valor in the moment of rebirth.


From the Back Cover
“First-rate research collaborates with first-rate imagination....Superb.”
—The Boston Globe

“[The World at Night] earns a comparison with the serious entertainments of Graham Greene and John le Carré....Gripping, beautifully detailed...an absorbing glimpse into the moral maze of espionage.”
—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times

“[The World at Night] is the world of Eric Ambler, the pioneering British author of classic World War II espionage fiction....The novel is full of keen dialogue and witty commentary....[T]hrilling.”
—Herbert Mitgang, Chicago Tribune

“With the authority of solid research and a true fascination for his material, Mr. Furst makes idealism, heroism, and sacrifice believable and real.”
—David Walton, The Dallas Morning News


About the Author
Often compared to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, Alan Furst is a master of the spy thriller and one of the great war novelists of our time. He is the author of Night Soldiers, Dark Star, The Polish Officer, and The World at Night. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.


From the Hardcover edition.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
10 May, 1940

Long before dawn, Wehrmacht commando units came out of the forest on the Belgian border, overran the frontier posts, and killed the customs officers. Glider troops set the forest ablaze, black smoke rolling over the canals and the spring fields. On some roads the bridges were down, but German combat engineers brought up pontoon spans, and by first light the tanks and armored cars were moving again. Heading southwest, to force the river Meuse, to conquer France.


In Paris, the film producer Jean Casson was sleep. His assistant, Gabrielle Vico, tried to wake him up by touching his cheek. They'd shared a bottle of champagne, made love all night, then fallen dead asleep just before dawn. "Are you awake?" she whispered.

"No," he said.

"The radio." she put a hand on his arm in a way that meant there was something wrong.

What? The radio broken? Would she wake him up for that? It had been left on all night, now it buzzed, overheated. He could just barely hear the voice of the announcer. No, not an announcer. Perhaps an engineer--somebody who happened to be at the station when news came in was reading it as best he could:

"The attack...from the Ardennes forest..."

A long silence.

"Into the Netherlands. And Belgium. By columns that reached back a hundred miles into Germany."

More silence. Casson could hear the teletype clattering away in the studio. He leaned close to the radio. The man reading the news tried to clear his throat discreetly. A paper rattled.

"Ah...the Foreign Ministry states the following..."

The teleprinter stopped. A moment of dead air. Then it started up again.

"It is the position of the government that that this agresssion is an intolerable violation of Belgian neutrality."

Gabriella and Casson stared at each other. They were hardly more than strangers. This was an office romance, something that had simmered and simmered, and then, one night. But the coming of the war turned out to be, somehow, intimate, like Christmas, and that was a surprise to both of them. Casson could see how pale she was. Would she cry? He really didn't know very much about her. Young, and slim, and Italian--well, Milanese. Long hair, long legs. What was she--twenty-six? Twenty-seven? He'd always though that she fitted into her life like a cat, never off balance. Now she'd been caught out--here it was war, and she was smelly and sticky, still half-drunk, with breath like a dragon.

"Okay?" He used le slang Americain.

She nodded that she was.

He put a hand on her neck. "You're like ice," he said.

"I'm scared."

He went looking for a cigarette, probing an empty packet of Gitanes on the night table. "I have some," she said, glad for something to do. She rolled off the bed and went into the living room. Merde, Casson said to himself. War was the last thing he needed. Hitler had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, then Poland. France had declard war, but it meant nothing. Germany and France couldn't fight again, they'd just done that-- ten million dead, no much else accomplished. It was simply not, everybody agreed, logique.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Reminiscent of the films noir of the 1940s, Alan Furst's World War II spy novels are classics of the form, widely praised as the most authentic and best-written espionage fiction today. In The World at Night Furst brings his extraordinary touch to a story of honor and lost love set against one of the twentieth century's great battlegrounds of intrigues - the German-occupied Paris of 1940. On the surface, film producer Jean Casson is a typical Parisian male: dark eyed, more attractive than handsome, well dressed, well bred. With his wife he has an "arrangement" - shared circle of friends, separate apartments - while he meets actors' agents and screenwriters in the best cafes' and bistros, spends evenings at dinner parties and nights in the beds of his women friends. Stunned at first by the German victory of 1940, Casson and others of his class are to learn, in the first months of occupation, that with enough money, compromise, and connections, one need not deny oneself the pleasures of Parisian life. But somewhere inside Casson is a stubborn romantic streak. It's what rekindles his passion for Citrine, the beautiful streetwise actress who was perhaps his only real love. And when he's offered the chance to take part in an operation of the British secret intelligence service, it's what gives him the courage to say yes. A simple mission, but it goes wrong, and Casson suddenly realizes he must gamble everything - his career, the woman he loves, his life itself.

SYNOPSIS

Often compared to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, Alan Furst is a master of the spy thriller and one of the finest war novelists of our time. Published to outstanding acclaim, his novels brilliantly recreate the atmosphere and tension of the worlds of espionage and resistance in the Europe of the 1930s and the Second World War. After many years living in France and traveling as a journalist in Russia and Eastern Europe, Furst now resides in Sag Harbor, New York.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booklist

With deft texturing and tight storytelling, Furst puts film producer Jean Casson into perilously exciting jams in German-occupied Paris. So complicated are Casson's problems, yet so clearly and cleverly constructed his extrications, that Furst never forces solutions, demonstrating that he wields that authentic literariness essential to the better espionage titles.

Publishers Weekly

With uninspired plotting, Furst makes disappointing use of a vividly evoked wartime Paris in his latest WWII espionage novel (The Polish Officer; Dark Star; Night Soldiers). Hedonistic Parisian film producer Jean Casson thrives in Paris's active film industry, enjoying the colorful social scene, the posh restaurants and the beautiful, available women. But this world he knows so well all but disappears when Germans march into France and seize the city. At first, Casson strives merely to survive, but he's soon drawn into duty as an amateur intelligence operative and finds himself in a precarious position, buffeted by British Intelligence, resistance forces and the Gestapo. In the process, Casson discovers two powerful forces within himself-his patriotism and his consuming passion for an old lover, the beautiful actress Citrine. Furst brings this fascinating, historic Paris to life with his usual masterful use of period detail. But while Casson makes an intriguing protagonist, his relationships with other characters are presented rather schematically-in particular, his affair with Citrine, which ultimately proves so influential, is never satisfactorily developed. More importantly, Casson's career as a spy, marked by mixed success on missions that seem insignificant, is anticlimactic and a bit confusing. In the end, the novel never attains the dramatic pitch of Furst's recent The Polish Officer. (June)

Library Journal

Jean-Claude Casson lives a hedonistic Paris existence as a low-budget film producer until the Germans invade France in 1940. Casson's need to continue working almost leads him into collaborating with the enemy. He is saved, temporarily, by the intervention of a group he thinks is British intelligence. He decides to work for the French Resistance only to have the Gestapo try to coerce him into betraying them. Furst, who has written several other World War II espionage tales, masterfully conveys a sense of daily life in occupied Paris, where even finding a newspaper was an ordeal. While the atmosphere is strong, Furst's storytelling skills are weak, shifting uneasily among the novel's many strands without always making the connections necessary for following the convoluted, often arbitrary, developments. The author also spends too much time on the producer's complicated love life, though he paints a vivid picture of the casualness of sexual relations in wartime. Stephen Thorne reads with a genteel English accent when a more earthy narration is called for. Recommended only for collections where Furst's works are popular.--Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

While working undercover for the British in Paris during the German occupation, film producer Jean Casson finds that he has become an unwitting accomplice in a plot to rob the British Secret Service of a great deal of money. The British pressure him to work for them to prove his trustworthiness; the Germans turn him into a double agent. A friend laments: "We're toys to them, Casson-if we don't sing and dance, we're broken." Casson drifts without hiding place in a world of exceedingly nasty actors, his only anchor his love affair with an aging actress. "We all thought...life would go on," muses a colleague of Casson, "But it won't." A novel of mood as much as action, this is worth reading. Recommended for public libraries.-David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus

AudioFile