Amberlough (The Amberlough Dossier #1)

Donnelly’s first novel is a triumph for those who enjoy sex, lies, and spies.

Each and every character has amazing depth and complexity. You end up rooting for people who, for all intents and purposes, aren’t terribly good people. But that’s the magic that ‘Amberlough’ has! Things are never black and white, and this book is all shades of gray.

The environments are vibrant and striking. You can smell the cigarette smoke wafting through the cabaret, while you can hear the click of heels on concrete floors. You can smell the gin on the breath of the dancer that’s crept up behind you, and is whispering secrets best saved for behind closed doors.

This novel will not leave you disappointed. There are so many points in the story where my stomach dropped, and so many others where I felt the euphoria that only a trip to the Bumble Bee Cabaret can bring. So grab your briefcase, meet your contacts, and try not to arouse suspicion. There’s too much at stake here. A must-read for any fan of the spy genre

If you need me, I’ll be looking into buying property in Amberlough City.

In spite of my fascination for Weimar Berlin, I came very close to bailing on Amberlough early on. It’s a fantasy take on Germany in the 1930s, and the rise of fascism, but in spite of the familiar frame, the info dumps of names and places were so dense in the first 50 pages, that I found myself reading without a lot of comprehension. “Who is that again?” I’d wonder, knowing that to try to go back and figure it out would probably be a lost cause.

Probably because I love the era so much, I persisted, and it did begin to pay off after that rocky beginning. I still had moments when I wasn’t sure what was being discussed, but I found that I had gained the context through which I could figure it out. If that sounds like a lot of work… well it might be for some, though in the end, I didn’t feel as if it was because I was enjoying the story by then, and the characters who had grown on me as I tried to sort out who they were and what they were up to.

At the bottom it’s a love story between two very different men who sometimes don’t even seem to like each other very much, set in an increasingly repressive social order in which a Nazi-like government — a group called “Ospies,” short for One State Party — is quickly seizing power through rigged elections and violence. It’s also the story of a young woman who is making her way through the underside of this society, growing increasingly angry and willing to do whatever she needs to do to monkey-wrench the Ospies’ plans. They’re all just people, fallible, sometimes cruel or foolish, but even when you don’t like them much, you care about what happens to them.

In spite of a bit of unevenness in the narrative, the aforementioned info dumps, and a point about two-thirds of the way through where it drags a bit, it’s still a compelling read if you give it a chance. But as it’s the first book of a trilogy, you will find things unresolved at the end. I plan to pick up the second volume as soon as it’s available, so color me sold on the universe and the characters.

Fascism’s coming to glittering cosmopolitan Amberlough, and as the One State Party looms over the city of long good nights, all the dancers and smugglers and politicians face a choice: bargain to survive, or fight and die?

Amberlough is a tryst between John le Carre’s grey-coated spies and Cabaret’s end-of-an-era seedy delights: the whole city’s going to have one drink too many, because it doesn’t want to go to sleep and face the jackboots tomorrow. Read this book if you love smugglers, strippers, spies and smoky bourbon in a city like Weimar Berlin, everyone desperately passionate and horribly hungover, all of them trying to keep their footing in a world that’s changing too fast.

Cyril dePaul is a spy who’s not just compromised but well and fully leveraged, thanks: caught between his duty to his masters in Amberlough, his affair with glamorous smuggler Aristide, and other, darker allegiances. Cyril’s a fascinating dude, because he’s caught right where every one of us would be if we realized fascism was coming – trying to protect his people, trying to be better than he is, tortured by the fear that he’s giving his soul away to save his comforts, certain that he’ll be destroyed in an instant if he makes one error. Cyril’s lover Aristide’s coworker at the Bumble Bee Cabaret – and maybe the key to Cyril’s salvation – is Cordelia Lehane, a born-to-nothing dancer and drugrunner who wants more than she’s got and knows how to use people to get it. As the cold creeps in, Aristide, Cyril, and Cordelia have to turn to – and against – each other to survive in the new regime.

Amberlough is a lush, lovely crawl through the high society parties, dockside dens and smoky headquarters of a city as real as yours – Donnelly’s prose is (to steal from the jacket copy) ravishing. I never knew there were so many perfectly specific words for luxury! And under the glitz there’s a steel bar of terror, a lever pushing everyone to the edge – because some people see Amberlough’s effusive corrupt decadent liveliness as rot, and they won’t stop cutting until the city and the nation are theirs.

Sit at the dark end of the bar, tip the tuxedoed woman who mixes your cocktail, and wait for your contact to pass you a brown envelope with the names of the friends you’re going to betray tomorrow. Consider: which people on that list can you afford to save? And what’s it going to cost you?

Read this book, look up, and think about what you’d do if you were Cyril or Cordelia. Pray you don’t have to find out.

Im not one for politically heavy books especially ones dealing with fascism so the fact that this was one of my favourite books of 2017 is a testament to Donnellys fabulous characters and writing. The city and it inhabitants leap off the page, bustling and vibrant from the government offices to the Bumble Bee cabaret. I found myself wrapped up in the characters lives almost from the start, especially the often fraught relationship between Cyril and Aristide. Cordelia too was a delight, full of sass and determination. I loved how diversity was seamlessly woven through the plot, from drag queens to polyamorous relationships. Obviously due to the political climate in the book some see these relationships in a negative light but that opinion isnt shared by the characters and many actively fight against it. It was evident early on that this is not the sort of book where everyone is going to have a happy ending and my heart was pounding throughout as I was so caught up in how perilous things were for them as they attempted to escape the Ospies. The ending left me ruined and Im so pleased this is becoming a series so Donelley can continue to torture my heart.

I’ve been exclusively reading queer fiction this year, to raise my mood and this is not the queer joy I had been looking for.

It is, however, a wonderful look at a flawed beauty, just as it comes to an inevitable end.

Several reviews and blurbs mention John le Carr and Cabaret, both of which are apt comparators. Our three protagonists are a spy with trauma in his past; his lover, a smuggler and leading man / drag queen at the titular city’s hottest club; and his leading lady, a awesome brassy broad.

The creeping fascism coming to destroy and reshape their city isn’t subtle and all three are doing the best they can with the shitty hands available to them. It’s heartbreaking at so many points and needs a CONTENT NOTE for on-page torture and murder. Donnelly did an excellent job at stripping me raw yet leaving me some hope, even as so much and so many are lost.

I’m definitely looking forward to reading both sequels. But maybe after reading something lighter first.

(And you should definitely read the reviews by Seth Dickinson and “Optimist King’s Wench”)

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