Richard Condon’s new novel, his most ambitious and important one, will provoke discussion among its thousands of readers here and abroad who will be moved and engrossed by it. 

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The action of An Infinity of Mirrors takes place between 1932-1944 in Paris, Berlin and then in Occupied Paris. Paul Bernheim, a beautiful young French Jew and “Veelee” Wilhelm von Rhode, a Prussian officer whose family had been a part of the German military establishment for several hundred years, met and fell in love in the spring of 1932. Within a few months they were married and had settled down in Berlin just as Hitler came to power. The story of what happens to these two brave and naïve people in the following twelve years is a microcosm of the fate of European civilization during the period. The rise of anti-Semitism in every stratum of German society, as well as the villainy of Erhard Drayst, an SS officer whose monstrosities surely make him one of the the most despicable characters in contemporary fiction, are responsible for the estrangement of Paule and Veelee. She returns to Paris with their young son – only to be reunited with Veelee during the Occupation when a vicious and brutally quixotic tragedy binds them in an action of revenge horrible even to themselves.

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Mr Condon’s research,  insight and ingenious plot interweaving fiction with the dramatic and historical events of the era have produced an authoritative account of Nazi Germany’s rise, degradation and collapse. In the story of his two protagonists and a score of fascinating subsidiary characters, he has chronicled the effect of Hitler’s most dreadful legacy: the corruption of decent people, who in fighting evil are themselves infected.