The Crooked Maid

(Paperback)

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Description

Vienna, 1948. The war is over, and as the initial phase of de-Nazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amidst the rubble. Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier after 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. As Anna and Robert navigate an unrecognizable city, they cross paths with a war-widowed American journalist, a hunchbacked young servant girl, and a former POW whose primary purpose is to survive by any means and to forget. Meanwhile, in the shells of burned-out houses and beneath the bombed-out ruins, a ghost of a man, his head wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future that is deeply uncertain for all. In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta returns to the shadows of war-darkened Vienna, proving himself once again 'a magical storyteller, master of the macabre' (David Park).

Reviews

A writer who illuminates the noir with a new darkness ... Vyleta creates a vivid Viennese waltz that explores the darkness of his chosen period in a way that both thrills and disturbs * David Park *
Heavy with atmosphere and moral menace, full of shadow and suspicion * Georgina Harding *
Vyleta builds an atmosphere of fear and paranoia ... With The Quiet Twin, he proves he's no one-book wonder * Globe and Mail *
Pungently recreates the noxious ethos in which it flourished, resembling Hitchcock's Rear Window rescripted by Dostoevsky and Kafka * Sunday Times *

Author Bio

Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. His first novel, Pavel & I, was published to international acclaim. His second novel, The Quiet Twin, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. A Canadian by adoption, Dan Vyleta teaches Creative Writing at Durham University. www.danvyleta.com