A brilliant spy novel and madcap adventure story from the author of The Torqued Man, set in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific during the outbreak of the Second World War.
In 1939, the clouds of war are gathering.
Richard Halifax-a man of much bravado, master of misadventure, and writer of the breeziest of prose styles-vanishes in the Pacific. Halifax was attempting to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco as part of the World's Fair festivities on Treasure Island. But from the moment he is declared dead, his machinations live on, upending the lives of those left in his wake back home.
Hildegard Rauch, an émigré painter and the daughter of Germany's greatest living writer in exile, finds her twin brother in a coma after an attempted suicide. He left a mysterious note that sends her on a search for the truth about her brother's relationship with a man named Richard Halifax, and the dangerous secret he entrusted to the writer before his fatal voyage.
Simon Faulk, a British intelligence officer and bogus vice-consul, has been assigned to uncover Nazi spies in California. He learns of the arrival of a mysterious agent from across the Pacific, part of a joint-German Japanese operation.
The paths of Hildegard and Faulk eventually converge as they follow separate trails that lead to the man assumed to have been lost at sea . . .
Told in the alternating voices of these three characters, set against the growing threat of a second World War and the San Francisco World's Fair dedicated to peace, Pacifica is a quixotic, darkly comic tale that explores the many forms of shipwreck and exile, the struggle to fashion a self that can stay afloat, and the stories we tell ourselves as we fight to survive.
"Writing with intelligence, style, and wit, Peter Mann has created two unforgettable characters and braided them together in a thrilling World War II story unlike any other." - David Ebershoff, New York Times bestselling author of The 19th Wife and The Danish Girl, on The Torqued Man
"I loved The Torqued Man, its riotous irreverence, its coiled suspense. It's a brilliant, surprising novel, Don Quixote by way of le Carré." - Jess Walter, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions, on The Torqued Man
"'Vexing' doesn't begin to describe the intricate maneuverings of the two narrators in Peter Mann's quick-witted World War II caper. But 'compelling' certainly does." - New York Times Book Review on The Torqued Man
"As the chapters alternate between the manuscripts, two irreconcilable portraits of Pike emerge, while de Groot's love for the Irishman gradually emboldens him." - The New Yorker ?on The Torqued Man
