Furst, as a novelist of historical espionage, is most often compared with the British authors Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. Asked about Ambler's books, Furst replies that “the best one I know is A Coffin for Dimitrios.” Published in 1939, a month before the invasion of Poland, Ambler's novel concentrates on clandestine operations in the Balkans and includes murder for money, political assassination, espionage, and drug smuggling. The plot, like that of an Alan Furst novel, weaves intrigue and conspiracy into the real politics of 1930s Europe.

  For the reality of daily life in eastern Europe, Furst suggests the novelist Gregor von Rezzori, of Italian/Austro-Hungarian background, who grew up in a remote corner of southeastern Europe, between the wars, and writes about it brilliantly in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which takes place in the villages of Romania and the city of Bucharest in the years before the war.

  To see life in that period from the German perspective, Furst says that Christopher Isherwood's novels The Last of Mr. Norrisand Goodbye to Berlin are among the best possible choices. The sources for the stage plays I Am a Camera and Cabaret, these are novelized autobiographies of Isherwood's time in Berlin; they are now published as The Berlin Stories. Furst calls them “perceptive and wonderfully written chronicles of bohemian life during the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.”

  For a historical overview of the period, Alan Furst recommends Martin Gilbert's A History of the Twentieth Century, Volume Two: 1933-1951. All the major political events that rule the lives of the characters in Alan Furst's novels are described, in chronological sequence, in this history.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Furst, Alan.

  Dark star /Alan Furst.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-48357-7

  I. Europe—History—1918-1945—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.U76 D37 2002

  813'.54—dc 21 2002017949

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.0

 

 

  Alan Furst, Dark Star

 

 

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