Operation Heartbreak
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A perfectly told tale of defeat and glory—and a paean to gallantry in the face of the absurd—inspired by a real-life secret mission during World War II.
Orphaned in the first months of World War One, when his father is killed in action, Willie Maryington dreams only of joining the same cavalry regiment and going to the front. The Armistice dashes seventeen-year-old Willie’s plans, but not his dreams of glory, and he makes the regiment the center of his adult existence. Yet, as the years go by, Willie falls increasingly out of step, not only with civilian life, but with the modern military, where horse charges are a thing of the past, and where a gulf yawns between those who saw action and those who did not. When hostilities break out again between Germany and England, Willie has become a relic. No one could guess that he will be chosen for a mission whose outcome might well decide the course of the Second World War.
Inspired by a real-life triumph of British counterintelligence (codenamed “Operation Mincemeat”), and based on classified sources, Operation Heartbreak was suppressed by the British government until 1950. A work of “jewel-like brevity and intensity” (New York Herald Tribune), it is a study in nostalgia and bewildered idealism to place beside the novels of Joseph Roth and Ford Madox Ford.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ironic 1950 novel from Cooper (1890–1954; Old Men Forget, a memoir), published for the first time in the U.S., draws on his time in Winston Churchill's cabinet during WWII, when, as Minister of Information, he was privy to the British deception plot known as Operation Mincemeat. The details of that plot are revealed at the end, as is the involvement of Cooper's main character, Willie Maryngton. Born in 1900, Willie is raised as a foster son by the widow of one of his late father's army comrades. At age 18, he joins a cavalry regiment, but the Armistice is announced before he can be sent overseas, denying him the chance to be a hero. He remains in the regiment and spends the interwar years stationed in India and Egypt. When WWII begins, Willie stays in England to train recruits, unaware of the role fate has in store for him. Willie's rigid adherence to the old order marks him as either heroic or foolish in the manner of Stevens, the head butler in Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. Some readers might find his passivity frustrating, but the novel's understated tone charms. Cooper's portrait of the interwar years is an appealing literary curiosity.