The Glass Pearls

Emeric Pressburger
Paperback
288 pages

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