Book description
By 1939, thousands of Italian intellectuals, teachers and lawyers,
journalists and scientists, had fled Mussolini's fascist government and
found refuge in Paris. There, amidst the poverty and difficulty of
émigré life, they joined the Italian resistance, founding an underground
press that smuggled news and encouragement back to their lost homeland.
In Paris, in the winter of 1939, a murder/suicide at a lovers' hotel
hits the tabloid press. But this is not a romantic tragedy, it is the
work of OVRA, Mussolini's fascist secret police, and meant to eliminate
the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine newspaper published by Italian
émigrés. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and found work as a
foreign correspondent for the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor.
Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the tragic end of the
Spanish civil war, but, as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by
the French Surete, by agents of 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 anti-fascists -- 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 the woman who
becomes the love of his Weisz's life, herself involved in a doomed
resistance underground in Berlin, at the heart of Hitler's Nazi empire.
Alan Furst has lived for long periods in France, especially in Paris,
and has travelled as a journalist in Eastern Europe and Russia. He has
written extensively for Esquire and the International Herald Tribune. He
lives in New York state.
