City of Secrets

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Stewart O'Nan



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When the war came Brand was lucky, spared death because he was young and could fix an engine, unlike his wife Katya and his mother and father and baby sister Giggi, unlike his grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. A Latvian and a Jew, he was interned first by the Russians, then the Germans, then the Russians again. By chance, he lived. While he was tempted almost daily (really, nightly), he wasn t enough of a fatalist to return the gift. The winter after the war, with no home to go back to and no graves to venerate, he signed on a Maltese freighter and landed in Jerusalem, realizing his mother s lifelong dream. In their dining room in Riga hung a bad lithograph of the walled city like a fortress out of Beau Geste, its stone golden in the numinous desert light. At the end of the seder, his Grandfather Udelson raised his glass to it.

Next year in Jerusalem. For Brand it was next year, without sweetness.

Like so many refugees, he drove a taxi, provided, like his papers, by the underground. His new name was Jossi. His job to listen again, lucky, since as a prisoner he had years of experience. With his fair hair and grade school Hebrew, he could be trusted. The British soldiers, the blissful pilgrim gawking tourists all wanted to talk. They spoke to him as if he were slow, leaning in close behind his ear, shaping each syllable.

Where was he from? What did he think of the trials? How did he like living in Jerusalem?

I like it; the man he was pretending to be said, instead of It s better than the camps," or "I like living," or, honestly, "I don t know."

The city was a puzzle box built of symbols, a confusion of old and new, armored cars and donkeys in the streets, Bedouin bankers. The Turks and Haredim, the showy Greek and Russian processions everyone seemed to be in costume, reenacting the

Stewart O'Nan is the author of fifteen previous novels, including West of Sunset, The Odds, Emily Alone, Songs for the Missing, Last Night at the Lobster, A Prayer for the Dying, and Snow Angels. His 2007 novel, Last Night at the Lobster, was a national bestseller and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, where he lives with his family.

Excellent . . .a little jewel, wonderfully sparse, moody and uneasy, reminiscent of the delicious, frayed-collar noir of le Carré s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. . .You can smell the squally desert wind that bends the cypress trees on the Jerusalem hills but never brings the rain. City of Secrets makes for great summer reading.
Jason Matthews, The New York Times Book Review

Post-World War II Jerusalem is the provocative setting for Stewart O Nan s atmospheric thriller. . .a richly-imagined story. . .may be one of O Nan s best.  Its strength lies in his ability, as always, to take us inside the minds and souls of characters, real or imagined.
The Chicago Tribune

Masterful. . .its impact is deceptively large because O Nan has something that can t be taught to a writer and can indeed by unlearned by talented writers:  the gift of authenticity.
The Washington Post

A fine piece of storytelling. . .a work in the exotic historic mode of Graham Greene, with the drier and grittier tone of Raymond Chandler. . .the moral struggle in City of Secrets is timeless and international.
The Boston Globe
 
Enthralling. . .O Nan takes a clear-eyed and unsentimental look at an astonishing slice of history one that is strikingly echoed by the heartbreaking events still unfolding in the Middle East.
The Seattle Times

A fast-moving story that brings fresh perspective to a moment of historical significance . . . O Nan s storytelling, once again, demonstrates why he has earned a place among our most illustrious writers.                                      
St. Louis Post Dispatch

A search for love and justice after the Holocaust. . . I ll not soon forget Brand and his quest for something