Ezzedine agrees to engage James in a discussion of theology to determine the future monarch’s true religious allegiance, while Belloc schemes a dastardly alternative to the plan Ezzedine agrees to. A decade later, a spy and actor named Geoffrey Belloc recruits the doctor-still languishing in England and having outwardly converted to Christianity-to befriend the “canny James the Scot,” the heir to the throne who many in Elizabeth’s Protestant court fear is secretly Catholic. In 1591, a Turkish doctor, Mahmoud Ezzedine, accompanies a diplomatic Ottoman mission to Queen Elizabeth’s court in England, a “far-off, sunless, primitive, sodden, heathen kingdom at the far cliffside edge of the civilized earth.” A guileless scholar surrounded by schemers, he becomes the queen’s pawn. A must for fans of Prague (Arthur Phillips) The Sellout (Paul Beatty) Necessary Errors (Caleb Crain) All That Man Is (David Szalay) and Temporary People (Deepak Unnikrishnan).All the world’s a stage, and spies are the most committed players, in Philipp’s winning latest (after The Tragedy of Arthur).
It is about getting away with something-being young, being cruel, falling in love. Visegrad presents a world at once familiar and preposterous-an imaginary world, and yet one that is historically accurate in its an amalgamation of Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Krakow, and Berlin. Rye realizes that he must sabotage the lucrative business he has helped build, or else abandon his friends to a shady cabal in the Visegrad government. Customers disappear and he is no longer free to leave the country.
Defer, who is developing a universal theory based on the wetness of feet, and the SEC man, who has been sent to Visegrad to determine how Rye’s boss acquires individual student loans.īefore long, Rye discovers he is being followed. He squares their accounts by signing the likes of Colin Having, who suspects the world’s dogs of conspiring against him, H. Things get complicated in this rollicking satire when Rye partners with a loan-shark who has purchased the outstanding student debt of his fellow expats. Meet Rye, a young American writer adrift in Visegrad, where the national sport is appearing to work as hard as possible while doing nothing at all. Arthur Phillips, author of Prague and The King at the Edge of the World So, while I’m rereading it, you should be getting started now on reading it the first time." I also have to reread it, probably right away, to sort out all the dizzying detail Robertson has packed it with. " Visegrad is very funny and very insightful-into Central Europe, into the US, into the expat mind.
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