WAR IN THE SHADOWS
Patrick Marnham
Oneworld, £10.99
Before he was captured, tortured and killed by the Nazis in 1943, Jean Moulin was one of the great unifying figures of the French Resistance. After Patrick Marnham had written a book about him, he received an anonymous 16-page letter which purported, through a series of cryptic and apparently unrelated references, to reveal the links between Moulin’s arrest and the collapse of the Resistance’s “Prosper” network. Marnham even had a personal connection to the events in Prosper member Anne-Marie de Bernard, who had taught him French in 1962. He recounts here how he decided to take the letter seriously and followed a trail of clues which led to the discovery of collusion between the Allies’ intelligence services to sacrifice Prosper for the sake of strategic expedience. Combining elements of history book and personal memoir, War in the Shadows has all the intrigue, duplicity and betrayal of a Le Carré or Deighton thriller.
DREAMTIME
Venetia Welby
Salt, £12
In 2035, Earth is plagued by rising sea levels, natural disasters and environmental crises. Air travel is about to be curtailed, so this is the last chance for Sol to find her father, an American marine stationed in Okinawa. Accompanied by her lifelong friend Kit, who shared Sol’s upbringing in a religious cult, she heads to Japan, but their odyssey takes them on to more remote Pacific islands, where supernatural forces seem to be awakening, as though the climate crisis has roused spirits bent on taking revenge on the despoilers of the natural world. The chequered history of the American military in Japan adds to the unease of their journey. Though the self-destructive Sol and her devoted Kit are at least an interestingly mismatched couple, the backdrop to their travels is more fully-realised than the central characters, the hallucinogenic edge to Welby’s prose evoking an otherworldly sense of impending reckoning for the human race.
NICK
Michael Farris Smith
No Exit, £8.99
In the year The Great Gatsby fell into the public domain, Michael Farris Smith explores the past of Nick Carraway, the narrator of Gatsby’s story. A passive observer in Fitzgerald’s original, he’s more proactive in this prequel, which takes him from Minnesota to the Western Front, where he finds and loses love before returning to America and going to live in New Orleans. Shattered by the war, he takes refuge in the bars and brothels of the French Quarter, before a meeting with another veteran spurs him back into engaging with people again, and the second half of the book is dominated by a war between New Orleans gangs. Benefiting from Smith’s affinity for Southern Gothic, and displaying as many echoes of Hemingway than Fitzgerald, it’s a well-told tale which shares little connective tissue with its predecessor beyond Carraway’s name, neither enhancing nor challenging the original but occupying a vaguely awkward middle ground.
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