The Glass Pearls

Nothing is more inviting to disclose your secrets than to be told by others of their own . . .

'At once a wonderfully compelling noir thriller and an audacious and challenging act of imagination.' William Boyd

'This extraordinary novel had me hooked from start to finish . . . A morally complex, deeply unsettling read.' Sarah Waters

London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler.

That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares become increasingly worse . . .  

A forgotten classic by the filmmaker of Powell and Pressburger fame, The Glass Pearls (1966) is not only a thrilling feat of Hitchcockian noir but a haunting dissection of guilt, paranoia and moral ambiguity.