Night Soldiers

by Alan Furst

Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim of Stalin's purges, Khristo flees to Paris. Night Soldiers masterfully re-creates the European world of 1934-45: the struggle between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia for Eastern Europe, the last desperate gaiety of the beau monde in 1937 Paris, and guerrilla operations with the French underground in 1944. Night Soldiers is a scrupulously researched panoramic novel, a work on a grand scale.

• ISBN10: 0297850717
• ISBN13: 9780297850717
• Publish Date: 5 May 2005 (first published 23 June 1988)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 22 July 2008
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
• Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

I have no idea what it was about this book but it was not for me.

The book was off to a great start with its unusual setting for a spy story that starts in rural Bulgaria, but then it seemed to loose its way for me.

It may have been Furst's attempt at writing a kind of panopticon that would show the different theatres of world history that were affected by the story in parallel that didn't work for me, or maybe it was because Furst's writing reminded me of Ken Follett's (who tried to pull of a similar overview of all the events in different locations in Fall of Giants ... God, I hated that book!) that put me off, but I just could not get invested in the story ... or the characters.

So, in the end, I finished the book, shrugged, and moved on.