World Pacific

"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 âemigrâe 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, World Pacific 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"--

Peter Mann is the author of the novel The Torqued Man, named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 and Best Historical Fiction of the year by CrimeReads. Originally from Kansas City, he is a longtime resident of San Francisco and teaches history and literature at Stanford. He also draws comics on his Substack newsletter The Quixote Syndrome.