Lily of the Field - Softcover

John Lawton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1611855918 ISBN 13: 9781611855913

Publisher: Grove, 2012

Synopsis

Written by 'a sublimely elegant historical novelist as addictive as crack' (Daily Telegraph), the Inspector Troy series is perfect for fans of Le Carre, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst. Vienna, 1934. Ten-year-old cello prodigy Meret Voytek becomes a pupil of concert pianist Viktor Rosen, a Jew in exile from Germany. The Isle of Man, 1940. An interned Hungarian physicist is recruited for the Manhattan Project in Los Alomos, building the atom bomb for the Americans. Auschwitz, 1944. Meret is imprisoned but is saved from certain death to play the cello in the camp orchestra. She is playing for her life. London, 1948. Viktor Rosen wants to relinquish his Communist Party membership after thirty years. His comrade and friend reminds him that he committed for life... These seemingly unconnected strands all collide forcefully with a brazen murder on a London Underground platform, revealing an intricate web of secrecy and deception which Detective Frederick Troy must untangle.

About this title

About the Author:

John Lawton worked for Channel 4 for many years, and, among many others, produced Harold Pinter's 'O Superman', the least-watched most-argued-over programme of the 90s. He has written seven novels in his Troy series, two Joe Wilderness novels, the standalone Sweet Sunday, a couple of short stories and the occasional essay. He writes very slowly and almost entirely on the hoof in the USA or Italy, but professes to be a resident of a tiny village in the Derbyshire Peak District. He admires the work of Barbara Gowdy, TC Boyle, Oliver Bleeck, Franz Schubert and Clara Schumann - and is passionate about the playing of Maria Joao Pires. He has no known hobbies, belongs to no organisations and hates being photographed.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Lawton’s fifth Inspector Freddie Troy novel, starring the aristocratic Scotland Yard copper, is the best yet in a consistently strong series. Lawton has always pushed the boundaries of the series crime novel, edging ever closer to broad-canvas historical fiction, but this time he has leaped the fence altogether. Like Dennis Lehane in The Given Day (2008), Lawton introduces multiple characters and stories in a sweeping tale that comes together at a particular historical moment, but unlike Lehane, he does all that without abandoning his series hero or the continuity established in the previous volumes. Drawing on the events chronicled in his earlier novels, especially Second Violin (2008), set during WWII, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna in 1934, where we meet 10-year-old cello prodigy Meret Voytek and her teacher, renowned musician Viktor Rosen, to London in 1948, with stops along the way at Auschwitz and Los Alamos. Voytek and Rosen are reunited in London, where they meet Inspector Troy, himself an aspiring pianist, and become persons of interest in a murder investigation. Yes, in the end this is a cold war spy novel, but if postwar London—the world of Philby and Burgess, of perpetual shortages and rationing in a grayed-out country “sadly in need of a metaphoric, symbolic coat of paint”—is the historical spot on the map in which the story reaches its climax, it is but one of many interconnected points in time and space that form the rich fabric of a truly multitextured tale. --Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1611855918
• ISBN 13: 9781611855913
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400