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The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel | 
| Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $14.07
You Save: $10.93 (44%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  47 reviews
Sales Rank: 116
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2
ISBN: 1400066026
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781400066025
ASIN: 1400066026
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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 attache 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 attache, 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
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| Customer Reviews: Read 42 more reviews...
 One of Furst's best. July 19, 2008
In his return to Warsaw, Alan Furst penned a work that, to me, reads more like The Polish Officer than any of his other works. The craft and protocols of the spy game, the rift in thinking (and arrogance) in the French general staff, the terrible innovations of Guderian.......... all mesh in a story that has room for a nicely choreographed romance. The only bone I have to pick is that perhaps too many of the characters somehow survive the tender mercies of pre-war Poland espionage, the Soviet purges, targeting by the Gestapo. If only the world was so kind.
 The Editor is Sleeping? July 17, 2008
I'm nuts about the work of Mr. Furst. But . . . I gave up reading this one on Page 165. His evocation of life at the time is not up to his usual, his characters aren't as interesting, his sentences aren't crafted as well as usual, and the plot, well, we don't always read him for plot. I've read most of his books more than once, but couldn't even finish this one. Either the editor was sleeping, or Mr. Furst feels he's now above the recommendations of editors, or it's an alimony novel, or something, but this piece of work is so far from his best that if it were the first novel of his that I read, I'd have never had the privilege of reading the rest of them.
Furst is first!!! July 17, 2008
Furst has done it again. His series of thrillers based on the events in Europe, Poland, the Balkans and the USSR leading up to and including World War II are must-reads in my opinion. I have read them all to date and each one offers a new perspective on this conflict. He examines the moral complexities of living in that horrific period of our history through the eyes of participants with whom we can identify, people who manage to make morally appropriate decisions under the worst of circumstances. Furst leaves me feeling optimistic about the ability of the human species to survive horrors with their goodness intact.
 Not as gripping as Furst's earlier works July 12, 2008
Alan Furst's latest,"The Spies of Warsaw", displays the same telling detail of people on the street that clarifies the plot and absorbs the reader into his complex espionage tales of pre-WW2 Europe. But alas, it is getting a little formulaic, and almost predictable which was never an earlier problem with his genre. Perhaps he has written it too soon, too quickly following his previous great successes. In "Spies of Warsaw" the aristocratic French spymaster beds the aristocratic lady of intrigue in Warsaw. Et alors? His field adventures measuring and documenting the Germans' preparations to run their tanks through the Ardennes into France,
intelligence that the hidebound French high command disastrously ignores, belabor the obvious. Furst seems to be writing under a tight deadline, and producing more of a thinner, movie script outline than his usual dense, compelling narrative. For those unfamiliar with Furst's works, though, read it for the coloration it provides - and then go read his earlier stuff.
Furst at the Top of His Form July 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Alan Furst and Charles McCarry are the two best spy novelists writing today. Neither of them write books with an excess of action, yet both write gripping page turners, capable of creating suspense and menace by virtue of something as commonplace as a late train. They also write books which are more than just pop fiction. Both of them have heroes who are not the best athletes or the smartest guys or the best equipped; what makes their protagonists special is their character.
Alan Furst's heroes do their best, fighting against the unspeakable evils of Naziism and Communism, as well as their own complacent bureaucracies. Furst captures the mood of Europe between the wars and his careful research of the geography and the social milieu creates the feeling, more than one finds in most other novels, that one is not only reading something that actually happened, but that it happened to the reader or to friends of the reader.
The Spies of Warsaw is Furst at his best. An aristocratic French colonel sniffs out the German plans for a blitzkreig through the Ardennes, but has trouble convincing French intelligence of the value of what he has discovered.
Perhaps it is because I have read most of Furst's books as they came out rather than all at once, but for the first time, I came to realize that all of his books are linked, that the same places, and sometimes, the same people, appear in otherwise unrelated books. The feeling you get if you read all of his books is of a small army of people fighting to stop an onrushing Holocaust. Like a city's subway system, each of his characters and novels run along their own tracks, sometimes intersecting with another, pushing on in their own missions, but all serving the same cause.
The result in enthralling and the more Furst novels that get written, the more the reader feels that he is privy to the secrets of a band of patriots, good people all, fighting to slow the inevitable.
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