What is Daniel Kalla reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Daniel Kalla, author of The Far Side Of The Sky and Rising Sun, Falling Shadow.

His entry begins:

I am just finishing The Crook Factory by Dan Simmons. I stumbled across this book in a tiny book store in rural Nova Scotia. I’d never read anything by the author, but when I scanned the flap and learned that it was a fictionalized account of Ernest Hemingway’s true life dabble into Nazi counter-espionage during 1942, I was hooked.

And I wasn’t disappointed. This novel packs in historical intrigue, pop culture and a veritable who’s who of mid Twentieth Century celebrities, including Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, J. Edgar Hoover and Ian Fleming (the James Bond writer who was apparently quite the dapper spy himself!) In a nutshell, the novel tells the story from the perspective of a fearless, yet troubled, loner of an FBI agent who is sent by Hoover to spy on the true-life, amateur U boat-hunting activities of Ernest Hemingway and his motley crew, “the crook factory”, in and around Cuba. Simmons...[read on]

About Rising Sun, Falling Shadow, from the publisher:

Return to World War II Shanghai in Dan Kalla's thrilling historical novel Rising Sun, Falling Shadow, the sequel to The Far Side of the Sky

It’s 1943 and the Japanese juggernaut has swallowed Shanghai and the rest of eastern China, snaring droves of American and British along with thousands of “stateless” German Jewish refugees. Despite the hostile environs, newlyweds Dr. Franz Adler and his wife, Sunny, adjust to life running the city’s only hospital for refugee Jews.

Bowing to Nazi pressure, the Japanese force twenty thousand Jewish refugees, including the Adlers, to relocate to a one-square-kilometer “Shanghai Ghetto.” Heat, hunger, and tropical diseases are constant threats. But the ghetto also breeds miraculous resilience. Music, theater, sports, and Jewish culture thrive despite what are at times subhuman conditions.

Navigating subversion and espionage, Nazi treachery and ever-worsening conditions while living under the heel of the Japanese military, the Adlers struggle to keep the hospital open and their family safe and united.

Visit Daniel Kalla's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Daniel Kalla.

--Marshal Zeringue