When the world is on fire, I turn to historical thrillers. When my personal world is full of fear and anger, I find comfort in Nazi henchmen and Communist spies. When I was pregnant during Australia’s Black Summer bushfires, I read Bernie Gunther like he might save me from inhaling smoke. I read Alan Furst’s gentlemen spies of eve-of-war Europe in hospital, with a newborn, in the first fearful days of the pandemic. I write this as Sydney goes through another lockdown. After a week inside, I dropped what I was reading and picked up the next Maisie Dobbs crime novel, set in the first days of World War Two.
This is not merely a preference; it is a necessity. But the only way I can tell you why is through the books themselves. I want to look at three authors and series—Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, Alan Furst’s pre-war Europe spy novels, and John le Carré’s Cold War novels—and through them, hope to explain how and why historical thrillers are the perfect books for the end of the world.
Goldberg, the Sydney-based founding member of the Monday Morning Cooking Club, a not-for-profit dedicated to curating and documenting recipes from Jewish kitchens across Australia and the world, doesn’t want her children to have the same “recipe regret”: the particular kind of sadness you feel when you’ve lost your chance to record a recipe and can’t get it back.
Lupus est tibi visus, Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History. “You have seen a wolf; therefore you are silent.” The loss of language in the wake of such encounters underlies much of Charlotte McConaghy’s blazing new novel, “Once There Were Wolves.”
Marburg’s clear, spare style allows her to engage the reader with complex, human, sympathetic characters in just 10 pages each.