Don Quixote in Exile

Peter Furst's biographical novel is the chronicle of a Jew who fled Germany in the 1930s. The odyssey begins in Monte Carlo, where a narrator named Peter is covering the auto races for a German newspaper. Preferring life as an exile over a return to Nazi Germany, Peter bounces to Madrid, where he's branded a Nazi; covers the Spanish Civil War from the back room of a Vienna coffeehouse; and journeys to Belgrade, where all the cafe patrons without dark glasses are assumed to be spies. His final journey, however, is far from droll or ironic: he and his new bride must desperately search the Caribbean for a country that will allow them entry.