Crooked Maid - Tapa dura

A Globe & Mail 100 Selection

From the writer praised as a cross between Hitchcock and Dostoyevsky, a dark and suspenseful novel set in post-war Vienna among the spectators in a criminal trial

Mid-summer, 1948. Two strangers, Anna Beer and young Robert Seidel, meet on a train as they return to Vienna, where life is just resuming after the upheavals of war. Men who were conscripted into the German army are filtering back home, including Anna’s estranged husband, Dr. Anton Beer, who was held prisoner in a brutal Russian camp. But when Anna returns to their old apartment, she finds another man living there and her husband missing.

At his own house, Robert is greeted by a young maid with a deformed spine. The household is in disarray, with his mother addicted to narcotics and his stepfather, an industrialist and former Party member, hospitalized after a mysterious attack.

Determined to rebuild their lives, Anna and Robert each begin a dogged search for answers in a world where repression is the order of the day. Before long, they are reunited as spectators at a criminal trial set to deliver judgment on Austria’s Nazi crimes.

In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta conjures up a city haunted by its sins and a people caught between the needs of the present and debts owed to the past.

Giller Prize–shortlisted and globally acclaimed author Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. Though he now calls Canada his home, he lives and teaches in the UK. His debut novel, Pavel & I, was published in thirteen countries and translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Quiet Twin, was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His most recent novel, The Crooked Maid, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a Globe and Mail Book of the Year. Visit him online at danvyleta.com and on Twitter @danvyleta.