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Narrator

Sara Coward

Sara Coward

  • Spanning the tumultuous years of 1934 to 1948, John Lawton’s A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters—Méret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel’s start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of postwar London, following the fascinating parallels of the physicist Szabo and musician Voytek as fate takes each far from home and across the untraditional battlefields of a destructive war to an unexpected intersection at the novel’s close. The result, A Lily of the Field, is Lawton’s best book yet, a historically accurate and remarkably written novel that explores the diaspora or two Europeans from the rise of Hitler to the postatomic age.

  • England in 1963 is a country set to explode. The old guard, shocked by the habits of the war-baby youth—sex, drugs, and rock and roll—sets out to fight back. The battle moves uncomfortably close to Chief Inspector Troy. While Troy is on medical leave for a nasty case of tuberculosis, the Yard brings charges against an acquaintance of his, a hedonistic doctor with a penchant for voyeurism and uninhibited young women. Two of these women just happen to be sleeping with a senior man at the foreign office and a KGB agent. But on the eve of the verdict a curious double case of suicide drags Troy back into active duty. Beyond bedroom acrobatics, the secret affairs now stretch to double-crosses and backroom deals in the halls of Parliament, not to mention murder. It’s all Troy can do, fighting off some bad habits of his own, to stay afloat in a country immersed in drugs and up to its neck in scandal.