Novel shortlisted for:
The Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction 2014(United Kingdom)
Winner:
Canada Book Awards(Historical Fiction, 2014 publication year)
Featured:
Historical Fiction Society(United Kingdom Review, Summer 2015)
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Mata Hari...
The name evokes images of espionage, sensuality, eroticism,
lust, love and betrayal, all amidst the backdrop of the First World War...
the Great War... the War to End All Wars.
Mata Hari...
You know the name of the woman who was accused of being the greatest
female spy of the century.
You know the name of the woman whose exploits were claimed to cause
the slaughter of 50,000 men.
Mata Hari...
You know her name, but you don't know her story.
–And it is not at all what you think.
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Born to an affluent Dutch family in 1876, Margaretha Zelle is cast into poverty, abandoned by the father she idolizes and watches helplessly as her mother dies of despair. An unwanted burden to her relatives and abused by men in authority, she flees into a marriage with a man so brutal their servants in the colonial East Indies take their revenge upon them in a way no woman should bear.
Penniless, alone and in defiance of convention, Margaretha reinvents herself in France as Mata Hari, a gifted dancer and notorious courtesan who epitomizes the grandeur of the Belle Époque– the Golden Age before the First World War.
Performing to packed houses across Europe, lover to crowned heads and the richest and most powerful men of the age, the public views her flamboyant life with outrage and envy. No one, not even the jealous imitators who conspire against her, sees the deep personal sorrow she hides within.
When the Great War crashes about her, trapping her deep within Germany, she escapes to her homeland as a destitute refugee before returning to Paris to rebuild her life and career. There she meets Vadim, a Russian nobleman who promises to make all her dreams come true and for whom she enters into the murky world of espionage, a game in which she is both player and pawn.
As unique in history as Cleopatra or Helen of Troy, a century after her death her name still has the power to enflame the imagination.
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