Pavel and I Book

Joseph Kanon’s The Good German meets Graham Greene’s The Third Man as the Cold War heats up amid the ruins of occupied Berlin.

Set during the winter of 1946–47, one of the coldest on record, Pavel & I unfolds against the tattered social fabric of postwar Berlin. Pavel Richter, a decommissioned GI, finds himself at odds with a rogue colonel in the British Armed Forces and a Soviet general when an American friend deposits a dead Russian spy in his frozen apartment. The race to take possession of the dead spy’s quarry soon begins threatening Pavel’s friendship with a street orphan named Anders and his budding love for his upstairs neighbor, Sonia. As the action hurtles toward catastrophe, the hunt merges with one for the truth about the novel’s protagonist: Who exactly is Pavel Richter? Peopled with pimps, prostitutes, spies, and a gang of child thieves, Pavel & I explores the power of storytelling to wrest meaning from the wreckage of civilization. An electrifyingly suspenseful novel played out among the first salvos of the Cold War, Pavel & I is a literary debut that introduces a writer of brilliant imagination and virtuosity.

Publishers Weekly

Set during the frigid Berlin winter of 1946, Vyleta's wily debut follows the exploits of an American GI, a German street urchin and an enigmatic prostitute as they struggle to survive both the cold and the looming Cold War. Pavel Richter, an American soldier who remained in Berlin after the war, is shocked when his friend Boyd White shows up at his door with a dead German midget. After agreeing to help Boyd hide the body, Pavel and his friend Anders are thrust into the middle of a conspiracy that runs deeper than they could ever imagine. Boyd soon turns up dead, and Pavel and Anders discover that the midget, Söldmann, was a spy for the occupying Russians and was set to deliver a mysterious package on the night of his death. Boyd's and Söldmann's deaths arouse the interest of Pavel's upstairs neighbors, the nefarious British Colonel Fosko and his prostitute companion, Sonia, who join the Russians and Germans in the hunt for Söldmann's lost loot, and Pavel finds himself falling in love with Sonia. Despite an overabundance of minor characters and a conclusion that isn't exactly surprising, Vyleta conjures a convincing postwar Berlin in all of its moral ambiguity. (Feb.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information