Dimensions
153 x 234 x 25mm
March, 1938. Austrian fascists run wild in the streets of Vienna. In Paris Nicholas Morath, former Hungarian cavalry officer, returns home to his young mistress in the Seventh Arrondisement. He has been in Slovakia, performing a quiet favour for his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi. Polanyi is a diplomat. Desperate to stop his country's drift into alliance with Nazi Germany, he trades in conspiracy - with SS renegades, Abwehr intelligence officers, British politicians, defectors. Hungary is a small nation caught between two great powers: it survives on equivocation and clandestine politics, a life in the shadows. To avoid being drawn into the coming conflagration will require extraordinary ingenuity.
It is Morath who does Polanyi's work, moving between the beach cafes of Juan-les-Pins and the forests of Ruthenia, the Czech fortresses in the Sudeten mountains and the private gardens of Budapest. Morath has been to war, fighting Cossacks in the Galician marshes on the Eastern front in 1914. Wounded, he has survived to live a Parisian life: a world of restaurants and nightclubs, and the bohemian circle of his Argentinian mistress.
But while the failure of appeasement becomes grimly apparent, as Hitler marches into Prague and threatens Poland, Morath is drawn deeper and deeper into danger, as quiet favours become vital secret missions, and Paris enjoys its last summer before the war.
