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Fiona Rintoul is a writer, journalist and translator. She is the author of The Leipzig Affair, which won the 2013 Virginia prize for the best new fiction by a woman writing in English and was serialised on BBC R4's Book at Bedtime in March 2015. She is also the translator of Outside Verdun, a new English-language version of Arnold Zweig's first world war classic, Erziehung vor Verdun, published in 2014 to mark the centenary of the start of the first world war.
Reviewed by Raanan Geberer for Readers' Favorite
The Leipzig Affair by Fiona Rintoul is an exciting historical novel/mystery story about the Cold War era in Europe. In 1985, Bob McPherson, a PhD student at St. Andrews University in Scotland, is persuaded by an advisor to take part in an East-West exchange program and study in Leipzig, East Germany. Once there, he meets a group of young people, the sons and daughters of the country’s elite, who clandestinely consume Western music, movies, magazines and anything else that’s available. Bob falls in love with Magda, one of the group. Unknown to him, however, Magda thinks of him merely as “the Westerner,” and is using him as part of an underhanded scheme. No matter: they both soon find themselves in the hands of the Stasi, the dreaded and brutal East German secret police.
Fiona Rintoul is adept at showing what the Cold War was about, especially to a younger audience. She accurately shows that even though they were all Communist, the Eastern countries had varying degrees of authoritarianism. One feature of the book that I enjoyed was Rintoul’s innovative use of pronouns: the chapters told through Bob’s voice are written in the first person, while those told through Magda’s voice are written in the second person (“You get up this morning”). While The Leipzig Affair touches on the end of the Cold War, it shows that this didn’t automatically solve all problems — even in a newly united Germany, East Germans were still looked on as the equivalent of backward hillbillies by their more urbane Western compatriots. All in all, The Leipzig Affair is a well-written novel where, in the end, most of the characters, both East and West, are victims of the conflict.
