Night Soldiers: A Novel.

FURST, Alan.

Item Number: 143411

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988.

First edition of “one of the very best novels ever written about the inner world of Soviet intelligence” (Thomas Powers). Octavo, original half cloth, cartographic endpapers. Boldly signed by Alan Furst on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Louise Noble.

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. “Intelligent, ambitious, absorbing . . . The history is deftly incorporated; the viewpoint civilized; the characters and the settings picturesque; the adventures exciting; the writing pungent" (Walter Goodman, The New York Times).