The Glass Pearls – Emeric Pressburger

Description

This thrilling tale of an ex-Nazi surgeon hiding in plain sight in 1960s London by the celebrated filmmaker is a lost gem with ‘the morbid tension of a thriller’ (introduced by Anthony Quinn, author of Curtain Call and Our Friends in Berlin).

Nothing is more inviting to disclose your secrets than to be told by others of their own …

London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares become increasingly worse .