The Year Is '42 (Vintage International) - Softcover

"Wholly original and moving. . . . Portrays history as the spymaster of us all." --John le Carré

"Absorbing. . . . So realistic that it seems almost impossible that the story and all the characters are entirely fictional."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"A shadowy novel, riddled with doubts and fears and suspicions that blow through the two cities and the village in a ghostly way. And it is full of beauty; fields, rivers, delicious meals and conversations." --Los Angeles Times

"What no resumé can transmit is the luminosity of this work, the magic it works on the reader as it draws one into 1942. . . . This is one of those very rare novels that you want to read again as soon as you've got to the end." --The Guardian (London)

Wehrmacht officer Karl Bazinger is living the high life in Occupied Paris. But with his glamorous dinner companions and his open disdain for the Nazis, he begins to attract the attention of the SS. He is drawn into further trouble when he receives a suspicious visit from a friend who may be involved in resistance activities. To lower his profile, Karl requests a transfer to Kiev, where he discovers the extent of the Nazi atrocities. He then begins to suffer from a mysterious ailment, and through the ministrations of a beautiful Russian doctor, he finds his vital reconnection to hope. Urbane, subtle, and elegiac,The Year is ’42 is a moving portrait of ordinary lives lived under the extraordinary circumstances of war.