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Formats
Paperback Details
  • 04/2015
  • 9780992017491
  • 506 pages
  • $24.99
Ebook Details
  • 04/2015
  • 9781987914009
  • 492 pages
  • $14.99
D.K.R. Boyd
Author
The Reflecting Man - Volume Two
D.K.R. Boyd, author

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Market)

In January of 1936, our loquacious and unreliable narrator, Kurtis De’ath arrives in London on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Kurtis is loaded with secrets, confections, and more than a few mysteries. Closeting his other identities (Herr Death, mysterious confidant of Adolf Hitler, and the Wagner Family’s Shokoladenmann, dispenser of the delightful Bird Bonz), he becomes fellow Maritimer, Lord Beaverbrook’s gossip columnist for the Daily Express and is immediately drawn into the political and social British maelstrom of Abdication and Appeasement. Deftly working his way through the class and clutter of English society as Kurtis Tod, he does his best to keep old friends (Erl Echland, Ulrich Roller, Bella Fromm), make new ones (Tom Driberg, William Joyce, ‘Huge’ Castlerosse), confound his enemies (Joseph Ball, Maxwell Knight, Josef Goebbels), and to derive some sense out of it all as the world edges even closer to a second Great War. And, when things get a little nasty, it may be that Kurtis De’ath is just the fellow you want on your side. \t Set in multiple locales in Canada, America, France, Germany, and England, before and during the Second World War, Volume Two of The Reflecting Man is the continuation of the antic, ribald journey of a loquacious and unreliable narrator, Kurtis De’ath, from the Maritimes in Canada, whose unusual talents lead him into the innermost circles of Hitler’s Third Reich and Churchill’s British government. Kurtis’ journey through the roots and branches of actual historical figures and events is, at its heart, in meticulous detail, an examination of how Europe went to war in 1939. The Reflecting Man is himself a reflection of his times. The novel is widely and deeply researched, employing hundreds of non-fiction accounts, journals, and diaries of actual participants and observers of the darkening clouds over Europe and the descent into war.
Reviews
Historical Novel Society

The second volume in D.K.R. Boyd’s sprawling “Reflecting Man” series follows the adventures of Boyd’s irrepressible main character and narrator, Kurtis De’ath, as he returns to England at the beginning of 1936 after an interval spent consorting with Adolf Hitler and the elite of Nazi leadership in Germany. In England, he becomes a gossip columnist for the Daily Express, which provides the perfect venue for his natural talents as a storyteller and gossip-monger.

When I hear a ripping tale I do like to pass it along,” he says at one point, and the bulk of Reflecting Man consists of one ripping tale after another, including quite a few about the Royal Family in the years immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. All the famous names are here, from Queen Mary to King George V to T.S. Eliot to Ernest Hemingway to the infamous Duke and Duchess of Windsor and their suspiciously close ties to Nazi Germany.

De’ath addresses his “dear Readers” directly and tells all these stories with chatty gusto (the whole while yearning for his native Canadian Maritimes, with its more civilized habits and superior food) that more than compensates for the book’s spattering of typos and somewhat nebulous actual plot. This is infectiously readable stuff.

Formats
Paperback Details
  • 04/2015
  • 9780992017491
  • 506 pages
  • $24.99
Ebook Details
  • 04/2015
  • 9781987914009
  • 492 pages
  • $14.99
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