The Spring of Kasper Meier
- Author Ben Fergusson
- Narrator Leighton Pugh
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Run Time 11 hours and 59 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Modern and contemporary fiction, Second World War fiction, War, combat and military adventure fiction.
Titles Purchased
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- Over 20
Price p/Title
- $15.99
- $14.99
- $13.99
- $12.99
- $11.99
Listen to a sample
What to expect
When a young woman, Eva, arrives at Kasper's door seeking the whereabouts of a British pilot, he feels a reluctant sympathy for her but won't interfere in military affairs. But Eva is prepared for this. Kasper has secrets, she knows them, and she'll use them to get what she wants. As the threats against him mount, Kasper is drawn into a world of intrigue he could never have anticipated. Why is Eva so insistent that he find the pilot? Who is the shadowy Frau Beckmann and what is her hold over Eva?
Under constant surveillance, Kasper navigates the dangerous streets and secrets of a city still reeling from the horrors of war and defeat. As a net of deceit, lies and betrayal falls around him, Kasper begins to understand that the seemingly random killings of members of the occupying forces are connected to his own situation. He must work out who is behind Eva's demands, and why - while at the same time trying to save himself, his father and Eva.
Critics Review
-
Beguiling, unsettling, and wonderfully atmospheric. A dark expedition across a nightmarish landscape of physical and emotional damage and moral decay
Sarah Waters -
The finest thing in the novel is the imaginative recreation of time and place, the bombed and ruined city over which the past hangs darkly, where no possible future can yet be envisaged . . . A decidedly accomplished first novel . . . where the keenness of observation and the rhythms of the prose call Graham Greene to mind
Scotsman -
Similarly intelligent is Ben Fergusson’s The Spring of Kasper Meier . . . the real coup here is the evocation of a minatory, crazy-quilt 1940s Berlin
Independent -
A truly outstanding work of fiction that will, I hope enter into the canon of English literature. It takes the known tragedies of the Second World War and extends them into what was, for most of the judges, an unknown arena: Berlin in the immediate aftermath of war, when the city was in ruins and the rubble gangs foraged for survival. The reality of it, the horror, was visceral and yet told with an immense and compassionate beauty. It’s a masterpiece. To have written it as a first novel is an exceptional achievement
Manda Scott -
Fergusson has already won two awards for this gripping and atmospheric debut, a thriller set amid the rubble of a defeated Berlin in 1945…What follows is original and highly accomplished
Sunday Times -
The plot is tight, but it’s the unflinching depiction of a desperate world in post-war Berlin, conveyed in beautiful prose, that makes this thriller so powerful
Sunday Mirror
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