The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta
The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta
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The Crooked Maid

Author: Dan Vyleta

Narrator: Kate Reading

Unabridged: 15 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/06/2013

Synopsis

Graham Greene meets Dostoevsky in a thrilling and atmospheric story of guilt and restitution set in postwar Vienna. Vienna, 1948. The war is over, and as the initial phase of de-Nazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amid the rubble. Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier after discovering her husbands infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerland is eighteen-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfathers sickbed and the secrets of his familys past. As Anna and Robert navigate an unrecognizable city, they cross paths with a war-widowed American journalist, a hunchbacked young servant girl, and a former POW whose primary purpose is to survive by any meansand to forget. Meanwhile, in the shells of burned-out houses and beneath the bombed-out ruins, a ghost of a man, his head wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future deeply uncertain for all. In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta returns to the shadows of war-darkened Vienna, proving himself once again a magical storyteller, master of the macabre (David Park).

About Dan Vyleta

Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He holds a PhD in history from King’s College, Cambridge. Vyleta is the author of several novels, including Pavel & I; The Quiet Twin, which was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; and The Crooked Maid, which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the J. I. Segal Award. An inveterate migrant, Vyleta has lived in Germany, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He currently resides in Stratford-upon-Avon in England.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Krista on June 26, 2017

What an amazing experience is The Crooked Maid. I picked it up because it made the Giller Prize shortlist, and judged alongside the other books I've read on that list so far, this would have been my choice for the prize -- with apologies to the actual winner, Hellgoing, which I also quite enjoyed. A......more

Goodreads review by Liviu on July 23, 2014

Loose sequel to The Quiet Twin and a suspensful edge on the seat read that kept me turning the pages till the great ending; superb characters in Anna de Beer, Robert Siedel, Annelise (the crooked back girl from Quiet twin who is now the title character) and the mysterious and seedy former POW and cu......more

Goodreads review by Shirley on December 05, 2013

This is a macabre but a fascinating story set in post WWII Vienna. This book was a 2013 Giller Prize finalist, and an odds-on favourite to take the coveted prize. It didn't win the prize, but it certainly is a book that belongs on the short list. This book's strength is it's remarkable sense of time......more

Goodreads review by Carrie on January 03, 2014

The Crooked Maid by Canadian writer Dan Vyleta is a murder mystery set in 1948 post war Vienna. The Third Reich has fallen and the Cold War is just beginning and a young Robert Seidel is returning home from Switzerland to Austria’s capital by train. He travels in the same train car as Anna Beer, the......more

Goodreads review by Natalie on July 13, 2015

In his afterword, Vyleta explains that he is trying to create a world in his book. While he indeed accomplishes this, it just wasn't a world I loved being in. He spends a considerable amount of time on the details and symbolism. This isn't a bad thing at all, as he creates an interesting setting; ho......more

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