The Crooked Maid: A Novel Audiobook

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 husband's 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 stepfather's sickbed and the secrets of his family's 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 means—and 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).

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“Impressive…If you enter [the] novel looking for atraditional murder mystery, prepare to be surprised: Vyleta is as interested inupsetting the expectations of genre as he is in engaging with them…This isVyleta’s world, and entirely his own. Every gesture is so acutely rendered thatwe enter a kind of eerie parallel world almost beyond reality. This is not justthe past: it is the past as seen fractured and magnified through a lens. It isa place of unremitting strangeness, as real and as true to its own logic asthose of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Goor Tom McCarthy’s Remainder.”

— Guardian (New York)