Showing results by author "Dan Vyleta" in All Categories

Smoke opens in a private boarding school near Oxford, but history has not followed the path known to us. In this other past, sin is a physical attribute, visible to all, and children are born carrying the seeds of evil within them. It is in this school, surrounded by the sons of the wealthy and well connected, that two boys called Thomas and Charlie discover that the world of smoke, soot and ash is not as it seems, for sin has a secret history and virtue a politics both intricate and murderous.

German-Canadian writer Dan Vyleta, famous for his debut novel Pavel & I which gained international acclaim discusses his latest novel Smoke, which tells an alternate-history of 19th century Britain.

Pavel Richter, a decommissioned GI, finds himself at odds with a rogue British Army colonel and a Soviet general when an American friend deposits a dead Russian spy in his frozen apartment. The race to take possesion of the dead spy's secert soon begins and threatens Pavel's friendship with a street orphan named Anders and his budding love for his upstairs neighbour, Sonia.

Welcome to a world where every desire is visible, rising from the body as a plume of Smoke. A world where bodies speak to one another and infect each other with desire, anger, greed. It is 1909, and this world stands on a precipice - some celebrate this constant whisper of skin to skin, and some seek to silence it forever. Enter Eleanor, a young woman with a strange power over Smoke and niece of the Lord Protector of England. Running from her uncle and home, she finds shelter in a New York theatre troupe.

Vienna, 1948: The war is over, and as the initial phase of denazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amid the rubble. Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier upon discovering her husband’s infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerland is 18-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfather’s sickbed and the secrets of his family’s past.

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed and he wants to know why. When an unexpected house call leads Doctor Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of Zuzka, the professor's niece. Wide-eyed, flirtatious, and not detectably ill, Zuzka leads the young doctor to her window and opens up a view of their apartment block that Beer has never known. Does one of these enigmatic neighbours have blood on their hands?

Berlin ligger i ruiner. Året er 1946. Det er endnu en af historiens koldeste vintre. Den amerikanske soldat Pavel Richter er af uvisse årsager blevet i den ugudelige by efter krigen. Anders er en tysk gadedreng. Da deres veje krydses, tager Pavel Anders under sine vinger, og sammen forsøger de at overleve i kulden og krigens efterdønninger.