"A damn good read."--Alan Furst
A brilliant debut novel, at once teasing literary thriller and a darkly comic blend of history and invention, The Torqued Man is set in wartime Berlin and propelled by two very different but equally mesmerizing voices: a German spy handler and his Irish secret agent, neither of whom are quite what they seem.
Berlin--September, 1945. Two manuscripts are found in rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war.
One of them is the journal of a German military intelligence officer and an anti-Nazi cowed into silence named Adrian de Groot, charting his relationship with his agent, friend, and sometimes lover, an Irishman named Frank Pike. In De Groot's narrative, Pike is a charismatic IRA fighter sprung from prison in Spain to assist with the planned German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil.
Meanwhile, the other manuscript gives a very different account of the Irishman's doings in the Reich. Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool, Pike appears here as the ultimate Allied saboteur. His mission: an assassination campaign of high-ranking Nazi doctors, culminating in the killing of Hitler's personal physician.
The two manuscripts spiral around each other, leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and De Groot's relationship, their ultimate loyalties, and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are caught.
About the Author :
Peter Mann is the author of the novel The Torqued Man, named one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 and Best Historical Fiction of the year by CrimeReads. Originally from Kansas City, he is a longtime resident of San Francisco and teaches history and literature at Stanford. He also draws comics on his Substack newsletter The Quixote Syndrome.
John Lee has read more than 100 audiobooks. His work has garnered multiple Earphones Awards and won AudioFile's Best Voice in Fiction & Classics in both 2008 and 2009. Lee narrated the audiobook for A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin, volume four of A Song of Ice and Fire. He has also read for Jack London, John Banville, Charles Dickens, and Barbara Taylor Bradford. In addition, Lee narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is also an accomplished stage actor and has written and co-produced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963-64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.
Review :
"A damn good read."
-- "Alan Furst, author of the Night Soldiers series"
"John Lee's thoroughly entertaining performance is so deft that listeners may take for granted what he's pulling off: shifting between two distinct points of view and worlds while keeping all the main and secondary characters unique and recognizable...Lee gives commanding portrayals of the erudite de Groot and the man-of-action Pike. In doing so, he consistently captures the German's cerebral wit and the Irishman's outlandish bravado. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award."
-- "AudioFile"
