Novels & Nibbles

Join us on Friday, September 18th at 7:00 PM at Nai Thai Cuisine in Dunwoody as we take on the entirety of Citizen Orlov by Jonathan Payne (Approximately 288 pages). Come hungry and ready to talk, and we'll get a table sorted once everyone rolls in.

Orlov is a fishmonger in a small, unnamed country somewhere in the mountains of central Europe, and the story opens around the end of the First World War. He's honest, unremarkable, and thinks of himself as a thoroughly good and dutiful citizen. One day he's walking past a government building, hears a telephone ringing through an open window, and answers it because it seems like the responsible thing to do. The voice on the line gives him a set of cryptic instructions meant for a secret agent, and by the time he tries to pass the message along and explain that he's nobody at all, it's already too late — everyone has decided he's an agent, and nothing he says talks them out of it. He gets absorbed into the Ministry of Security, handed a real assignment involving the king, and dropped into a world of competing schemes where he can't tell who's on which side or what he's actually walked into. That's our spy pick for the month, though Orlov has to be one of the least likely secret agents to ever anchor one. It's set up as a comic spin on the genre, with all the usual machinery — handlers, coded phone calls, a jumpy security state — dropped on top of a man who has no business being anywhere near any of it.

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