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The Dancer Upstairs

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Brought to you by Penguin.


From the acclaimed author of The Sandpit, an exhilarating literary thriller about the hunt for a missing terrorist in South America.

This novel explores one of the most astonishing stories in the whole history of twentieth century terrorism. Colonel Rejas was the policeman charged with the task of capturing the Peruvian guerrilla leader Ezequiel, but having been dismissed he finds the burden of silence and secrecy too heavy. On meeting Dyer, a foreign correspondent, he is moved to relate the tortuous progress of the manhunt for the first time. The Dancer Upstairs is a story reminiscent of Graham Greene and John le Carré - tense, intricate and heartbreaking.


© Nicholas Shakespeare 1995 (P) Penguin Audio 2010

 Espionage Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Political Spies & Politics Suspense Thriller & Suspense
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I struggled with a busy schedule to find the time to read... however, half-way through I took time out to read Cheever?s short story The Swimmer which, actually, is head and shoulders above this novel. The literary acclaim which surrounds The Wapshot Chronicle seems disproportionate to the actual achievement contained in this novel - for a start I don?t think by any means it is within the top 60 books of the Twentieth Century. Equally, the fear - which it is claimed has been completely countered, that the novel is simply a collection of short-stories strung together by a connecting theme of family and the individual members thereof - doesn?t seem in my view to stand up to scrutiny either. This is a long, rambling tome which at times is really quite entertaining and at other times drifts into mediocrity of a sort that is not a feature of Cheever?s concentrated short story form. Worth reading to get the whole picture on John Cheever, but I?m pretty certain that his reputation lies in his short-story achievement and will continue to do so.

Slapdash Chronicle

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