I am a great fan of Robert Harris. I have read nearly all his books, including his excellent Roman trilogy about poet and statesman, Cicero. I particularly like this book about the Dreyfus affair. There have been numerous versions of this story, both non-fiction and novels, but Harris tops them all imho. I am the author of a Holocaust themed love story called Starcrossed: A True Romeo and Juliet Story in Hitler's Paris, which required a huge amount of historical research to bring WW2 Paris to life, so I appreciate the way Harris has brilliantly researched this book, to make you feel you are there in France. Second, Dreyfus is a wonderful character, complex and intelligent. His antagonists from the army are suitably Machiavellian. He is fitted up, partly because he is Jewish. But in the end he is exonerated. I felt like cheering when the guilty verdict was overturned. Five stars.
National Book Awards Popular Fiction Book of the Year 2013
They lied to protect their country. He told the truth to save it. A gripping historical thriller from the bestselling author of FATHERLAND.
January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of twenty thousand spectators baying 'Death to the Jew!'
The officer is rewarded with promotion: Picquart is made the French army's youngest colonel and put in command of 'the Statistical Section' - the shadowy intelligence unit that tracked down…
Robert Galbraith is a pen name for JK Rowling and this bears all the hallmarks of her brilliance. The two central characters, detective duo Strike and Robin, are perfectly pitched. Strike, particualrly, with his army background, prosthetic leg, and doomed love affair with the gorgeous Charlotte, is a particularly finely drawn character. The plot is complex, without being convoluted, and the london setting is wholly authentic. Enthusiastically recommended.
'Teems with sly humour, witty asides and intelligence ... A pleasure to read' TIMES
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Now a major BBC drama: The Strike series
When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, she just thinks he has gone off by himself for a few days - as he has done before - and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.
But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realises. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost…
I loved this novel about a Russian count holed up in a luxury hotel in St. Petersburg. His daily life in the hotel, his relationship with the gamin, Nina; and the Russian revolutionary context in Moscow are all brilliantly handled. I felt as though I was there with him. Five stars!
The mega-bestseller with more than 2 million readers, soon to be a major television series
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility, a beautifully transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and…
Paris 1940. The City of Light is under Nazi occupation when a spirited young Jewish girl, Annette Zelman, arrives in the French capital from Nancy as a refugee and enrolls at the Academie des Beaux Arts in the Latin Quarter. It is only a stone’s throw from the legendary Café de Flore, and Annette is soon rubbing shoulders with the likes of Picasso, Django Reinhardt, and Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote movingly about Annette’s disappearance.
It was also at the café that she met her beau, a young Catholic poet named Jean Jausion. They fall in love and, despite opposition from their parents, decide to marry. But just after they publish their marriage banns, Annette is arrested by the Gestapo ….
