The Polish Officer: A Novel [Paperback]

September 1939. As Warsaw falls to Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Captain Alexander de Milja is recruited by the intelligence service of the Polish underground. His mission: to transport the national gold reserve to safety, hidden on a refugee train to Bucharest. Then, in the back alleys and black-market bistros of Paris, in the tenements of Warsaw, with partizan guerrillas in the frozen forests of the Ukraine, and at Calais Harbor during an attack by British bombers, de Milja fights in the war of the shadows in a world without rules, a world of danger, treachery, and betrayal."Beautifully written, powerfully imagined, and riveting as pure story....The book is a triumph."
--Charles McCarry

"Brilliantly imagined, vividly drawn, rich with incident and detail....The Polish Officer portrays ordinary men and women caught out on the sharp edge of military intelligence operations in wartime: the partisans, saboteurs, resistance fighters and idealistic volunteers risking their lives in causes that seem lost."
--Robert Chatain,Chicago Tribune

"[A] riveting ‘pure’ story...wonderfully exact...transcends the spy novel while delivering everything any fan of le Carré could ask for."
--Robin Winks,The Boston GlobeAlan Furst, an acknowledged master of the European espionage thriller, has produced a stunning achievement inThe Polish Officer: dark, evocative, authentic, and taut with suspense.The Research of Alan Furst’s Novels

Alan Furst describes the area of his interest as “near history.” His novels are set between 1933-the date of Adolf Hitler’s ascent, with the first Stalinist purges in Moscow coming a year later-to 1945, which saw the end of the war in Europe. The history of this period is well documented. Furst uses books by journalists of the time, personal memoirs-some privately published-autobiographies (many of the prominent individuals of the period wrote tlóz