From my good friends at Crown Publishing this is a book that looks like it would be of interested to anybody interested in World War II. If this looks of interest please be sure to check back. Crown Publishing is generously going to provide a copy for a giveaway on this blog. Please be sure to support them in return by visiting their site and seeing the other fine books they have available.
The true story of
an unlikely band of courageous men--British intelligence officers and Cretan
resistance fighters--who waged an underground war against the German occupation
of Crete and pulled off an improbable and remarkable mission: kidnapping the
German commander of the island.
by Wes
Davis
Advance Praise
for The Ariadne Objective
“History both crucial and swashbuckling.” —Library
Journal
“An
exciting, tense narrative that unfolds like an espionage novel.” —Booklist
“An exciting, earnestly
narrated World War II story.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Meticulously researched and gracefully narrated. The
Ariadne Objective shows close-up the final gaudy flowering of the imperial
swashbucklers—indifferent to discomfort, fluent in many languages, reckless,
eccentrically decadent, mischief-makers, never unintentionally ill-mannered—who
made their home in the world, before George Smiley took over his grudging
service to the Empire.”
—Geoffrey
Wolff, author of A Day at the Beach
“Wes Davis’ brilliant chronicle of the battle for
German-occupied Crete is doubly rich in its description of character and of the
perilous varieties of combat. This story tells how classically literate and
well-nigh fearless Britons allied with brigandish locals to confound,
confuse, and finally defeat the Nazi occupiers. It reveals how completely
British improvisation and perception of local realities served to overcome a
ruthless enemy.”
—Robert Stone,
author of Dog Soldiers
“In the grand tradition of
John le Carré, Wes Davis has created a thrilling tale of espionage in the face
of great peril. This is gripping history, masterfully told.” —McKay Jenkins,
author of The Last Ridge
“The
Ariadne Objective is a ripping yarn, and Wes Davis is the perfect
person to spin it. Ariadne will appeal to fans of Ben Macintyre
books like Double Cross and Operation Mincemeat and, in
fact, to anyone who enjoys a good story well told. This book kept me up well
past my bedtime: I couldn’t go to sleep until I finished it.”
—Ben Yagoda,
author of About Town and How to Not Write Bad
In 1991, while working on an archaeological
excavation in Crete, WES DAVIS learned
of a daring, little-known military operation that disrupted Hitler’s control of
the island during World War II. A group of unconventional British soldiers
infiltrated occupied Crete, charged with the task of sabotaging Nazi objectives
in the region by joining forces with Cretan partisans. Their acts of espionage
culminated in a cunning plot to abduct the island’s German commander.
After decades of research that took Davis
from Crete, to the depths of London’s National Archives, where he combed
through thousands of declassified documents, and to the Imperial War Museum,
where he found the unpublished diary of one of the amateur spies, this
incredible true story comes to life in THE
ARIADNE OBJECTIVE: The Underground War to Rescue Crete from the Nazis (Crown Publishers; November 12, 2013). Davis’s brilliant debut re-creates this
secret war from the perspective of the gentlemen soldiers who found themselves serving in Crete because, as one
of them put it, they had made “the obsolete choice of Greek at school.” The
group of unlikely heroes included Patrick Leigh Fermor, a Byronic figure and
future travel-writing luminary; John Pendlebury, a swashbuckling archaeologist
with a glass eye and a swordstick; Xan Fielding, the writer who would produce
the English translations of books like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes;
and Sandy Rendel, a future Times of London reporter,
who prided himself on a disguise that left him looking more ragged and fierce
than the locals he fought alongside.
Anchored by a
fascinating cast of characters and set in one of the war’s most exotic locales,
THE ARIADNE OBJECTIVE sheds light on
the pivotal mission to save Crete and block Hitler’s march to the East.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: WES DAVIS served for
two years as an assistant to the director of excavations at Kavousi in Eastern
Crete, not far from the plateau where Patrick Leigh Fermor parachuted onto the
island during WWII. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Princeton
University and is a former assistant professor of English at Yale University.
Editor of the Harvard University Press Anthology
of Modern Irish Poetry, he has
written for the New York
Times, the Wall
Street Journal, and The
Nation,
among other publications.
Crown Publishers •
November 12, 2013 • Price: $26.00 hardcover • 352 pages
ISBN 978-0-307-46013-4
ISBN 978-0-307-46013-4
Also available as
an ebook
Visit www.crownpublishing.com
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