Extraordinary Renditions

Music, war, and imperial ambition touch three lives in this intricately woven story.

World-renowned composer and Holocaust survivor Lajos Harkályi has returned to Hungary to debut his final opera and share his mother’s parting gift, the melody from a lullaby she sang as he was forced to leave his Hungarian home for the infamous Czech concentration camp Terezín.

Private First Class Jonathan “Brutus” Gibson is being blackmailed by his commanding officer at the US Army base in Hungary, one of the infamous black-sites of the global War on Terror, and he must decide between going AWOL or risking his life to make an illegal firearms deal in Budapest.

Aspiring musician Melanie Scholes is preparing for the most important performance of her career as a violinist in Harkályi’s opera, but before she takes the stage she must extricate herself from a failing relationship and the inertia that threatens to consume her future.

As this book reaches a crescendo, their three stories achieve an alchemical harmony, reminding us that each individual has the spirit to contend with tyranny, apathy, and the brutal circularity of history.

Andrew Ervin grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and has lived in Budapest, Illinois, and Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in Akashic’s Chicago Noir, and excerpts from this collection have appeared in Conjunctions and the Southern Review. A former bookseller and accomplished literary critic, his essays and reviews have appeared in the Believer, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and USA Today. Extraordinary Renditions is his first novel.