Staying Alive (Prequel to the Soe Quartet) - Hardcover

Fullerton, Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316732605 ISBN 13: 9780316732604

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group, 2006

Synopsis

After Rosie Ewing (SOE wartime secret agent) had read Alexander Fullerton's four novels based on her adventures in German-occupied France, she wrote to him suggesting that he might like to hear the story of her first deployment, when she'd parachuted into moonlit countryside near Cahors and made her way down to Toulouse to join the SOE network as a radio-operator and courier. With no source of information about this first mission, he had begun instead by writing of her second outing, which became Into the Fire, followed by Return to the Field, In at the Kill and Single to Paris.
SOE (Special Operations Executive) was an organisation employing exceptionally courageous men and women who had the icy nerves necessary for that sort of work, as well as certain specialist skills, and in the case of 'F' Section fluent French. Rosie was twenty-four at the time, and the expected life-span of a radio-operator was something like six weeks.
She did a lot better than that - in 2002 she was eighty-four. She and Alexander Fullerton met in Toulouse, at a reunion of surviving wartime agents, and the story emerged, over meals and drinks and strolls along the banks of the Garonne, of a group codenamed Countryman who, in the late autumn of 1942, were briefed by London to get a certain German out of Vichy's hands. What they didn't know was that they themselves were being sold out to the Gestapo.
Of course they were aware of betrayal as a constantly looming danger. All too many SOE networks had been 'blown', with agents disappearing into Gestapo cellars and the extermination camps. It was the dread every agent lived with every minute of every day and night - the essence of the tale Rosie had lived to tell - and, extraordinarily, a life-or-death issue once again during the course of the reunion.

About this title

About the Author:

Alexander Fullerton has been regarded as one of Britain's premier adventure novelists since his first book SURFACE! was a bestseller in 1953. Apart from the acclaimed Everard series he is the author of an SOE quartet featuring Rosie Ewing.

Review:

"His action passages are superb and he never puts a period foot wrong."  —The Observer

"The research is unimpeachable and the scent of battle quite overpowering."  —Sunday Times

"The most meticulously researched war novels that I have ever read."  —Len Deighton, author, Charity

"The tension rarely slackens and the setting is completely convincing."  —Times Literary Supplement

"The accuracy and flair of Forester at his best."  —Irish Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0316732605
• ISBN 13: 9780316732604
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368