Richard’s Feet

By Carey Harrison

In the bitter spring of 1948, an Englishman walks across Soviet Germany, against a tide of refugees, searching for the woman he fell in love with before the war…

He will become a lord of the underworld in a country rising from the ashes, where confidence is fast becoming a national trick, and where no one is who they claim to be.

For Richard Thurgo, a man eager to reinvent himself, it is heaven on earth.

Richard is presumed to be dead and buried.

But to be exact, a pair of feet are dead and buried – they alone remained intact, beneath the wreckage of a crashed and burnt-out jeep.

Richard is alive and ready to embrace a new identity.

Faking his own death, Richard adopts a new name and career on the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s busy red-light district.

As Germany prospers in the fifties and sixties so does Richard, now an influential figure in the underworld, but two threats continue to hang over him – his own discarded identity and that of Germany’s.

Set in England and Germany around the time of the Second World War, Richard’s Feet is a magnificent story of intrigue and obsession. It follows the adventures of an unscrupulous Englishman whose formative experiences in the Germany of the thirties, both erotic and political, draw him back there after the war.

Winner of the 1990 UK Society of Writers’ Encore Award and long-listed for the Booker Prize, Richard’s Feet is the first in the The Heart Beneath Quartet.The second and third books are Cley and Egon.

Carey Harrison was born in Britain and raised in the United States where he has spent the majority of his working life. He began as a stage playwright, completing 42 plays for the stage and forty plays for BBC radio. He is also an actor, teach and novelist and was described in the Dublin Evening News as ‘one of the most accomplished writers of our time’. He lives in Woodstock, New York.