Alan Furst Books In Order

Night Soldiers Books In Publication Order

  1. Night Soldiers (1988)
  2. Dark Star (1991)
  3. The Polish Officer (1995)
  4. The World at Night (1996)
  5. Red Gold (1999)
  6. Kingdom of Shadows (2000)
  7. Blood of Victory (2002)
  8. Dark Voyage (2004)
  9. The Foreign Correspondent (2006)
  10. The Spies of Warsaw (2008)
  11. Spies of the Balkans (2010)
  12. Mission to Paris (2012)
  13. Midnight in Europe (2014)
  14. A Hero of France (2016)
  15. Under Occupation (2019)

Roger Levin Books In Publication Order

  1. Your Day in the Barrel (1976)
  2. The Paris Drop (1980)
  3. The Caribbean Account (1981)

T.J & Blake Books In Publication Order

  1. The Big Tip (2014)
  2. Kofi’s Plot (2019)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Shadow Trade (1984)

Childrens Books In Publication Order

  1. Give Peas a Chance (2014)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Book of Spies: An Anthology of Literary Espionage (2003)

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Alan Furst Books Overview

Night Soldiers

In Bulgaria in 1934, nineteen year old Khristo Stoianev sees his brother kicked to death by a gang of strutting thugs. Realizing the growing menace of fascism, he takes a risk on the promise of communism and flees to Moscow, where he is trained as an agent of the NKVD, precursor of the KGB. His first mission is to Catalonia, where he is soon caught up in the bloody horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Then he learns that he is to become the victim of one of Stalin’s purges and is forced to flee once again, this time to Paris. He is a hunted man and before his silent war is over, every rule will be broken…
and all loyalties discarded. ‘Night Soldiers has everything the best thrillers offer excitement, intrigue, romance plus grown up writing, characters that matter, and a crisp, carefully researched portrait of the period in which our own postwar world was shaped.’ USA Today

Dark Star

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 when he is sent to retrieve a battered briefcase the plot thickens and is drawn into even more complex intrigues. Szara becomes a full time spymaster and as deputy director of a Paris network, he finds his own star rising when he recruits an agent in Berlin who can supply crucial information. Dark Star captures not only the intrigue and danger of clandestine life but the day to day reality of what Soviet operatives call special work.

The Polish Officer

September, 1939. The invading German Wehrmacht blazes a trail of destruction across Poland. Warsaw is surrounded. France and Britain declare war, but do nothing to help. And 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 intelligence service, a cartographer who now must learn a dangerous new role: spymaster in the anti Na*zi underground. 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 that span occupied Europe; he moves through Poland, France, and the Ukraine, 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 Na*zis 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.

The World at Night

Occupied Paris is brought vividly to life in this wonderfully atmospheric and evocative wartime thriller set in the shadowy world of resistance, from the highly acclaimed author of Dark Star and The Polish Officer. Combining the authenticity of the finest historical novels with the dark intrigue and romance of the best spy novels, Alan Furst’s haunting tales of undercover life in ’30s and ’40s Europe are regularly compared with the best of Eric Ambler and John le Carre and have won extraordinary praise from critics on both sides of the Atlantic. In The World at Night he has created a truly memorable tale of survival and defiance. Set in the shadowy back streets and glittering salons of wartime Paris, it follows film producer Jean Casson, a Paris sophisticate struggling to come to terms with the uncomfortable realities of life under German occupation, as he becomes reluctantly caught up in the activities of what was to become the French Resistance.

Red Gold

Autumn 1941: In a shabby hotel off the place Clichy, the course of the war is about to change. German tanks are rolling toward Moscow. Stalin has issued a decree: All partisan operatives are to strike behind enemy lines from Kiev to Brittany. Set in the back streets of Paris and deep in occupied France, Red Gold moves with quiet menace as predators from the dark edge of war arms dealers, lawyers, spies, and assassins emerge from the shadows of the Parisian underworld. In their midst is Jean Casson, once a well to do film producer, now a target of the Gestapo living on a few francs a day. As the occupation tightens, Casson is drawn into an ill fated mission: running guns to combat units of the French Communist Party. Reprisals are brutal. At last the real resistance has begun. Red Gold masterfully re creates the shadow world of French resistance in the darkest days of World War II.

Kingdom of Shadows

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. Author Alan 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.

Blood of Victory

In 1939, as the armies of Europe mobilized for war, the British secret services undertook operations to impede the exportation of Roumanian oil to Germany. They failed. Then, in the autumn of 1940, they tried again. So begins Blood of Victory, a novel rich with suspense, historical insight, and the powerful narrative immediacy we have come to expect from bestselling author Alan Furst. The book takes its title from a speech given by a French senator at a conference on petroleum in 1918: Oil, he said, the blood of the earth, has become, in time of war, the Blood of Victory. November 1940. The Russian writer I. A. Serebin arrives in Istanbul by Black Sea freighter. Although he travels on behalf of an migr organization based in Paris, he is in flight from a dying and corrupt Europe specifically, from Na*zi occupied France. Serebin finds himself facing his fifth war, but this time he is an exile, a man without a country, and there is no army to join. Still, in the words of Leon Trotsky, You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. Serebin is recruited for an operation run by Count Janos Polanyi, a Hungarian master spy now working for the British secret services. The battle to cut Germany’s oil supply rages through the spy haunts of the Balkans; from the Athen e Palace in Bucharest to a who*rehouse in Izmir; from an elegant yacht club in Istanbul to the river docks of Belgrade; from a skating pond in St. Moritz to the fogbound banks of the Danube; in sleazy nightclubs and safe houses and nameless hotels; amid the street fighting of a fascist civil war. Blood of Victory is classic Alan Furst, combining remarkable authenticity and atmosphere with the complexity and excitement of an outstanding spy thriller. As Walter Shapiro of Time magazine wrote, Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.

Dark Voyage

In the first nineteen months of European war, from September 1939 to March of 1941, the island nation of Britain and her allies lost, to U boat, air, and sea attack, to mines and maritime disaster, one thousand five hundred and ninety six merchant vessels. It was the job of the Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy to stop it, and so, on the last day of April 1941…
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, she 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 Malm . But she is not the Santa Rosa. She is the Noordendam, a Dutch freighter. Under the command of Captain Eric DeHaan, she sails for the Intelligence Division of the British Royal Navy, and she will load detection equipment for a clandestine operation on the Swedish coast a secret mission, a Dark Voyage.A desperate voyage. One more battle in the spy wars that rage through the back alleys of the ports, from elegant hotels to abandoned piers, in lonely desert outposts, and in the souks and caf’s of North Africa. A battle for survival, as the merchant ships die at sea and Britain the last opposition to Na*zi German slowly begins to starve.A voyage of flight, a voyage of fugitives for every soul aboard the Noordendam. The Polish engineer, the Greek stowaway, the Jewish medical officer, the British spy, the Spaniards who fought Franco, the Germans who fought Hitler, the Dutch crew itself. There is no place for them in occupied France; they cannot go home. From Alan Furst whom The New York Times calls America s preeminent spy novelist here is an epic tale of war and espionage, of spies and fugitives, of love in secret hotel rooms, of courage in the face of impossible odds. Dark Voyage is taut with suspense and pounding with battle scenes; it is authentic, powerful, and brilliant. From the Hardcover edition.

The Foreign Correspondent

From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls America’s preeminent spy novelist, comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts passion to fight in the war against tyranny. By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini s fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of migr life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story. Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers hotel. But this is no romantic traged it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini s fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine migr newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor. Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French S ret , by agents of the 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 antifascists: 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 Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz s life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin. The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement. From the Hardcover edition.

The Spies of Warsaw

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 attach from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw, the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Times as America s preeminent spy novelist. War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life and death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attach , Colonel Jean Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier s brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed. The Houston Chronicle has described Furst as the greatest living writer of espionage fiction. The Spies of Warsaw is his finest novel to date the history precise, the writing evocative and powerful, more a novel about spies than a spy novel, exciting, atmospheric, erotic, and impossible to put down. As close to heaven as popular fiction can get. Los Angeles Times, about The Foreign Correspondent What gleams on the surface in Furst s books is his vivid, precise evocation of mood, time, place, a letter perfect re creation of the quotidian details of World War II Europe that wraps around us like the rich fug of a wartime railway station. Time A rich, deeply moving novel of suspense that is equal parts espionage thriller, European history and love story. Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times, about Dark Star Some books you read. Others you live. They seep into your dreams and haunt your waking hours until eventually they seem the stuff of memory and experience. Such are the novels of Alan Furst, who uses the shadowy world of espionage to illuminate history and politics with immediacy. Nancy Pate, Orlando Sentinel

Spies of the Balkans

Greece, 1940. Not sunny vacation Greece: northern Greece, Macedonian Greece, Balkan Greece the city of Salonika. In that ancient port, with its wharves and warehouses, dark lanes and Turkish mansions, brothels and tavernas, a tense political drama is being played out. On the northern border, the Greek army has blocked Mussolini’s invasion, pushing his divisions back to Albania the first defeat suffered by the Na*zis, who have conquered most of Europe. But Adolf Hitler cannot tolerate such freedom; the invasion is coming, it s only a matter of time, and the people of Salonika can only watch and wait. At the center of this drama is Costa Zannis, a senior police official, head of an office that handles special political cases. As war approaches, the spies begin to circle, from the Turkish legation to the German secret service. There s a British travel writer, a Bulgarian undertaker, and more. Costa Zannis must deal with them all. And he is soon in the game, securing an escape route from Berlin to Salonika, and then to a tenuous safety in Turkey, a route protected by German lawyers, Balkan detectives, and Hungarian gangsters. And hunted by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, as war threatens, the erotic life of the city grows passionate. For Zannis, that means a British expatriate who owns the local ballet academy, a woman from the dark side of Salonika society, and the wife of a local shipping magnate. Declared an incomparable expert at his game by The New York Times, Alan Furst outdoes even his own finest novels in this thrilling new book. With extraordinary authenticity, a superb cast of characters, and heart stopping tension as it moves from Salonika to Paris to Berlin and back, Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to right in many small ways the world s evil.

The Book of Spies: An Anthology of Literary Espionage

A collection of work from some of the finest novelists of the 20th century. Inspired by the politics of tyranny or war, each of these writers chose the basic elements of highly evolved spy fiction as the framework for a literary novel. The book offers a diverse array of selections that combine raw excitement & intellectual sophistication in an expertly guided tour of the dark world of clandestine conflict. We meet diplomats, political police, agents, provocateurs, resistance fighters, & assassins players in the Great Game, or victims of the Cold War. The authors include: Eric Ambler, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorky, Graham Greene, John le Carre, W. Somerset Maugham, Charles McCarry, Baroness Orczy, John Steinbeck, & Rebecca West.

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