In Another Country and Besides

Book excerpt: Romance and revenge collide in this “uniquely exciting . . . moving and beautiful” novel of expats in post-war Europe (Valerie Hemingway). Harry Hoffman is an expatriate living in Venice. During a time of moral bankruptcy, disillusion, and unrealized love, Harry is a lost soul still running from a sinister past. Then he meets the enigmatic Cleo, who offers him the pleasures of an exquisite and unexpected affair. It’s all a chance for Harry to start over. When this newfound happiness is threatened and their affair is strained by jealousy, Harry can’t help but fall back on what he knows best: vengeance. It takes him from Zurich and the Swiss Alps, to the Cote d’Azur and finally, irresistibly, back to Paris, the city from which he’d once fled. A novel of cruelty and passion, loyalty and courage, and the tragic death of an ideal, In Another Country, and Besides is “a tenderly absurd, heart-breaking . . . [and] truly gripping story” (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch).