Padilla, Ignacio

New York. 2003. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0374261903. Translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush & Anne McLean. 195 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lynn Buckley. Jacket photograph of Adolf Eichmann (c) Bettmann/Corbis. Author photograph (c) Jerry Bauer . keywords: Literature Latin America Mexico Translated. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The winner of Spain's prestigious Premio Primavera Award. In 1916, on a train heading to the Austro-Hungarian Empire's disastrous Eastern Front, Viktor Kretzschmar and Thadeus Dreyer face each other over a chessboard. It is a game to the death: the winner will take Kretzschmar's identity as a railway signalman and live Out the war in safety. The loser will go to the Front. When the game ends, a sequence of events that will span decades as well as continents has been set in motion. In 1943, the decorated World War I hero and influential Nazi General Thadeus Dreyer is in charge of training doubles to stand in for leading Nazis at dangerous public events. But when the Amphitryon Project falls out of favor with Goering, Dreyer and his team of doubles vanish, and their disappearance remains unsolved. In 1960, an escaped Nazi is uncovered in Buenos Aires, where he has been living under an assumed name. One of the few Nazis to be recaptured, he is extradited to Israel and executed. Only an old Polish count claims to know his true identity, but he dies before it can be revealed. The clues that connect these men are concealed in an old encrypted manuscript that the count has left to his heirs-an unlikely trio of misfits who suddenly find themselves at the center of a dangerous game as they are compelled to decipher the deceits of decades past. Mesmerizing and suspenseful, Shadow Without a Name explores questions of identity and history against the backdrop of the darkest periods of twentieth-century Europe, and stands as an impressive introduction to one of Mexico's most gifted contemporary writers. inventory #33864 ISBN: 0374261903.