by Alan Furst
Part of Night Soldiers, book 1
First published 2005
Bulgaria, 1934. Local fascists murder a young man, leaving his brother Khristo Stoianev to face a terrible choice. The NKVD recruits him into Soviet secret intelligence and ships him off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. But Stalin's purges reach everywhere, and Khristo learns he has become a target. He escapes to Paris, where the beau monde clings to its final moments of desperate celebration in 1937. The war catches up with him there too. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia battle for control of Eastern Europe while Khristo finds himself pulled into the French underground resistance in 1944. He must navigate between competing powers that view him as either an asset or a threat. The novel follows his journey through a decade of European upheaval, from the mountains of Spain to the streets of occupied France, as he struggles to survive forces much larger than himself.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, military-fiction, espionage
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, France, Paris, Spain
Period: 1934, 1937, 1944
511 pages · Hardcover · Weidenfield & Nicolson Orion Publishing
Content warnings: death, violence, war