Lucy

by Paul Pickering

Paul Pickering's new anti-war novel Lucy is about obedience and rebellion, how one survivor in the actual and moral wasteland of immediate post-war Berlin takes over the lives of three others, psychologically and sexually, in the way Hitler took over a country.

The worldwide protests surrounding the 2024 conflict in Gaza mirror the rebel spirit at the heart of Pickering's important, groundbreaking novel. Set partly in a German kibbutz, started by Nazis to remove Jews, there is a clash between utopian ideas and the toxic nationalism necessary to found the state of Israel. Operation Lucy, once an idealistic, anti-Nazi espionage ring, of which all the main characters are part, has become a self-devouring monster. 

Lucy is darkly comic, showing how best intentions, when they pass through the looking-glass of human failings, change to the opposite. Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" means no escape because of contradictory rules, "Lucy" is the Lucifer paradox, where the only good is bad, and only bad is good.

A thrilling, disturbing and utterly compelling read from one of the UK's most celebrated authors.

422 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 15, 2024

Reviews

[Kevin Cowdall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Pickering is the natural heir to Grahame Green and Evelyn Waugh. In 'Lucy', his latest novel, he sets the scene with a burning man running naked through the rubble of Berlin on the last day of WWII. What follows is a thoroughly engrossing read.

All of the key elements we have come to expect are here to relish once more – bewildered central characters adrift in danger-filled locations, cultural clashes and political scheming, religious discord, brutal murders, dark personal secrets, and mysterious love interests.

This is a tense, complex, darkly humorous, and ultimately thought-provoking story, with a strong sense of both time and place, and an intriguing cast of multi-national characters, who are not all they may seem.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Pickering's complex but highly readable novel is a timely anti-war tome. I often think that those who can write 'dark humour' are the most accomplished of writers, and Pickering's novel is no exception. But this novel is more than that, it is fiction as an exploration of what could (what actually might) happen, and reading it in the wake of wars going on today, to be frank, makes the writing all the more unsettling. Obedience and control; human nature and inhuman nature. It's all here. Thought-provoking, to say the least. Highly recommended. My thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for the ARC.

[Brian Hanson · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Jew, a gypsy, a Nazi and a US colonel walk into a bar. There is no punchline.