Cold Victory
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4.3 • 15 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
AN AMAZON TOP 10 BOOK OF THE MONTH
From New York Times bestselling author Karl Marlantes comes a propulsive and sweeping novel in which loyalty, friendship, and love are put to the ultimate test
Helsinki, 1947. Finland teeters between the Soviet Union and the West. Everyone is being watched. A wrong look or a wrong word could end in catastrophe. Natalya Bobrova, from Russia, and Louise Koski, from the United States, are young wives of their country’s military attachés. When they meet at an embassy party, their husbands, Arnie and Mikhail, both world-class skiers, drunkenly challenge each other to a friendly – but secret – cross-country wilderness race.
Louise is delighted, but Natalya is worried. Stalin and Beria’s secret police rule with unforgiving brutality. If news of the race gets out and Mikhail loses, Natalya knows it would mean his death, her imprisonment, and the loss of her two children. Meanwhile, Louise, who is childless, uses the race as an opportunity to raise money for a local orphanage, naïve to the danger it will bring to Natalya and her family. Too late to stop Louise’s scheme, a horrified Natalya watches as news of the race spreads across the globe as newspapers and politicians spin it as a symbolic battle: freedom versus communism. Desperate to undo her mistake, Louise must reach Arnie to tell him to throw the race and save Mikhail – but how? The two racers are in a world of their own, unreachable in Finland’s arctic wilderness.
This is another masterful novel from the author of the modern classic MatterhornCold Victory is a triumph.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marlantes (Deep River) sets his stirring story of innocents abroad in 1946 Finland as the Cold War is heating up. Arnie Koski is a taciturn Finnish American and champion skier assigned as the military attaché to the American legation in Helsinki. His wife, Louise, is an Oklahoman and former sorority president whose guilelessness contrasts with the savvy machinations of American and Soviet agents who are spying on them. At their first embassy party, Arnie and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Bobrov, who met as allies during the war, get drunk and challenge each other to a clandestine ski race through Northern Finland. As they prepare for the 500-kilometer course ("their own little Olympics"), Louise attempts to befriend Mikhail's glamorous and wary wife, Natalya, and, in a subplot that causes the novel to drag, raise money for a Finnish orphanage. Owing to Louise's carelessness, the ski race gets picked up by the press and spun into a proxy battle between democracy and communism. Louise's naivete strains credulity, but the novel comes alive in its last third, as the former soldiers finally embark on the race, having agreed on acceptable types and doses of performance enhancing drugs but unprepared for the dire stakes, as Mikhail's death is all but certain should he lose and embarrass the Soviet Union. Marlantes sticks the landing in this satisfying drama.
