
The Sunday Times bestseller Vienna 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief a young English actor walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist Dr Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis when a young woman enters. She is clearly in distress but Lysander is immediately drawn to her strange hazel eyes & her unusual intense beauty. Her name is Hettie Bull. They begin a passionate love affair & life in Vienna becomes tinged with a powerful frisson of excitement for Lysander. He meets Sigmund Freud in a cafe begins to write a journal enjoys secret trysts with Hettie & appears
- miraculously
- to have been cured. Back in London 1914. War is imminent & events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander in the most damaging way. Unable to live an ordinary life he is plunged into the dangerous theatre of wartime intelligence
- a world of sex scandal & spies where lines of truth & deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code which is threatening Britains safety & use all his skills to keep the murky world of suspicion & betrayal from invading every corner of his life. Moving from Vienna to Londons West End from the battlefields of France to hotel rooms in Geneva Waiting for Sunrise is a feverish & mesmerising journey into the human psyche a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe a plot-twisting thriller & a literary tour de force from the bestselling author of Any Human Heart Restless & Ordinary Thunderstorms.