ALL SHALL BE WELL - A WONDERFUL NEW BOOK WILL BE LAUNCHED TOMORROW IN DEVIZES, WILTSHIRE

    

                    THE LIFE OF MARY ESSBERGER

A wonderful novel, by Richard Essberger

Pre-order from Quacks Books, York

£15.99 - 01904 635967 - website - design@quacks.info

Meet the author – bookings and pre-orders

6 for 6.30 pm, Wed 15 Nov, Devizes - 01380 725944 - devizesbooks@gmail.com

Noon, Thu 16 Nov, London - 01904 635967 - Friends House

Noon, Tue 21 Nov, York - 01904 635967 - Quacks Books

A synopsis

 

In 1938 Mary, a young Englishwoman in London, meets Josef, an anti-Nazi Austrian refugee who has escaped from Vienna to Prague. They fall in love.

 

Josef, unknowingly, carries a deadly secret. In 1934, during the Austrian Civil War, as a member of the Schutzbund, the Austrian Social Democrat’s paramilitaries, he had witnessed in the Vienna Woods a young Englishman taking orders from a Soviet OGPU general.

 

After the German invasion of Austria in 1938 he is betrayed to the Gestapo (by his own mother, no less) as a member of the underground. He escapes by night, on foot, across the border to Prague. Then, after the Munich Agreement, with the Nazi grip tightening on Czechoslovakia, he escapes again by train and ferry via Poland to London, assisted by Czech military intelligence and the Quakers (who shortly afterwards help set up the famous Kindertransport rescue trains; Warner Brothers' shortly to be released film, One Life, is about that story).

 

In 1940 Josef is interned and shipped to Canada, despite MI5 - for whom he is working - trying to prevent this. Letters in both directions take three months and both are wracked by doubt... ‘Has he survived the U-boats?’ ‘Has she survived the bombs?’ ‘Does he, does she, still love me?’ Released, Josef returns in early 1941 to London in the middle of the Blitz. Soon, in Brixton, they marry.

 

For the third time he joins the Czech Army and is later trained by SOE. But then, out of the blue, his ‘unknown’ secret catches up with him. In MI5’s wartime headquarters in Blenheim Palace he sees the man he first saw in 1934 in the Vienna Woods. Yet neither his MI5 controller nor, at first, Mary, believes him when he says this man, Philby, is a Communist.

 

In 1950 Josef takes Mary and their daughter by train - the Arlberg Express - to meet his family in Vienna, where Russia is one of the four allied occupying powers. At Semmering, in the Alps, an NKVD lieutenant and Red Army soldiers attempt to drag him off the train... 

 

But that’s enough, let’s not give the ending away. Not least because it’s hard to know.