Richard’s Feet by British author Carey Harrison, a multiple award-winning playwright and novelist who is also the son of classic actor Rex Harrison (of My Fair Lady and Cleopatra fame), is the 1st novel in his The Heart Beneath quartet of historical literary thrillers, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher Endeavour Press’ Odyssey imprint.
This was originally published in 1990 by Mackays of Cheltham and won the UK Society of Writers’ Encore Award in 1990 and was also longlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel explores themes of post-World War II identity and starts in the late 1940s, set in England and Soviet-dominated Germany and continues there for some decades after, with references back to events during the 1930s.
The story stars an Englishman who goes in search of a woman he once loved during the pre-war years, hoping to find her in Soviet Germany, and eventually becomes a boss in the criminal underworld of Hamburg after faking his death and adopting a new identity, though he finds out he cannot fully escape the influence of the life he had before.
Offered worldwide, available at Amazon.
Free for a limited time, available worldwide @ Amazon
Description
In the bitter spring of 1948, an Englishman walks across Soviet Germany, against a tide of refugees, searching for the woman he fell in love with before the war…
He will become a lord of the underworld in a country rising from the ashes, where confidence is fast becoming a national trick, and where no one is who they claim to be.
For Richard Thurgo, a man eager to reinvent himself, it is heaven on earth.
Richard is presumed to be dead and buried.
But to be exact, a pair of feet are dead and buried – they alone remained intact, beneath the wreckage of a crashed and burnt-out jeep.
Richard is alive and ready to embrace a new identity.
Faking his own death, Richard adopts a new name and career on the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s busy red-light district.
As Germany prospers in the fifties and sixties so does Richard, now an influential figure in the underworld, but two threats continue to hang over him — his own discarded identity and that of Germany’s.
Set in England and Germany around the time of the Second World War, Richard’s Feet is a magnificent story of intrigue and obsession. It follows the adventures of an unscrupulous Englishman whose formative experiences in the Germany of the thirties, both erotic and political, draw him back there after the war.
Winner of the 1990 UK Society of Writers’ Encore Award and long-listed for the Booker Prize, Richard’s Feet is the first in the The Heart Beneath Quartet.The second and third books are Cley and Egon.
With Blackjack and Hookers 