A brilliant debut novel, at once teasing literary thriller and a darkly comic blend of history and invention, The Torqued Man is set in wartime Berlin and propelled by two very different but equally mesmerizing voices: a German spy handler and his Irish secret agent, neither of whom are quite...  more

A brilliant debut novel, at once teasing literary thriller and a darkly comic blend of history and invention, The Torqued Man is set in wartime Berlin and propelled by two very different but equally mesmerizing voices: a German spy handler and his Irish secret agent, neither of whom are quite what they seem. Berlin—September, 1945. Two manuscripts are found in rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war.  One of them is the journal of a German military intelligence officer and an anti-Nazi cowed into silence named Adrian de Groot, charting his relationship with his agent, friend, and sometimes lover, an Irishman named Frank Pike. In De Groot’s narrative, Pike is a charismatic IRA fighter sprung from prison in Spain to assist with the planned German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil.  Meanwhile, the other manuscript gives a very different account of the Irishman’s doings in the Reich. Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool, Pike appears here as the ultimate Allied saboteur. His mission: an assassination campaign of high-ranking Nazi doctors, culminating in the killing of Hitler’s personal physician. The two manuscripts spiral around each other, leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and De Groot’s relationship, their ultimate loyalties, and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are caught.

Strasbourg, 1518. At the height of summer, a lone woman begins to dance in the city square. She dances for days without rest, and when hundreds of other women join her, the city council declares a state of emergency. Musicians will be brought in to play the Devil out of the mob. At the...  more

Strasbourg, 1518. At the height of summer, a lone woman begins to dance in the city square. She dances for days without rest, and when hundreds of other women join her, the city council declares a state of emergency. Musicians will be brought in to play the Devil out of the mob. At the city's boundary, pregnant Lisbet lives with her husband and mother-in-law, tending the bees that are the family's livelihood. Her quiet life is upended by the return of her sister-in-law, Nethe, from seven years in the mountains, where she has been paying penance for a crime no one will name. As the city buckles under the beat of a thousand feet, Lisbet becomes caught in a dangerous web of deceit and clandestine passion. Set in an era of superstition, hysteria, and extraordinary change, and inspired by true events, The Dance Tree is an impassioned story of family secets, forbidden love, and women pushed to the edge.