The German Woman, available at your favorite bookseller now, is my second novel. Inspired by the true story of a team of filmmakers tried for treason after the start of World War I for making a film critical of our new allies, the British, it has been receiving tremendous early reviews. I look forward to hearing from you as well.

The Boston Globe
Micheal Kenney of The Boston Globe calls The German Woman a “fine novel, with its…wealth of indelible images…emotionally taut…[and] intricately plotted.”

Vogue:
Vogue placed the “cinematic” German Woman on their top ten summer books list in June of 2009.

The Courier-Journal:
In its recent review, Mary Whelp wrote that: “Book blurbs (and, for that matter, music, film and television series promoters) are forever claiming, “Fans of ________ will love this!” The major corporations even have computer-auto-generated responses to carry out their mission. That’s why if you order a novel set in Tanzania, the next time you log on to the site where you bought it, it will suggest that you might also want to order the book Say it in Swahili.

Thus, it seems inevitable that a novel called The German Woman , set in Europe at the end of both world wars, a book, moreover, that involves espionage, traitors, bombings and love affairs, is going to be compared to Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Alan Furst, Sebastian Faulks, Michael Ondaatje, Pat Barker and, if the blurber really knows his literary spy stuff, perhaps even Eric Ambler. Three of the above do in fact appear on the dust jacket of Paul Griner’s The German Woman.

To find out which three, you’ll have to buy the book, and it will be well worth the price to do so. But in truth, Griner’s writing stakes out its own territory. Besides, when you really study it, how much is any of these writers’ style like that of the others? Ondaatje’s prose can be as obfuscating as Greene’s is lucid; Furst’s can be as superficial as Barker’s is profound. And sometimes (just sometimes) you want to shout at Le Carré to cut to the chase already!
No reader will want to admonish Griner to cut to the chase. His technique has always been one of pared-down incisiveness, his characters acutely observed, his subject matter gritty and Book blurbs (and, for that matter, music, film and television series promoters) are forever claiming, “Fans of ________ will love this!” The major corporations even have computer-auto-generated responses to carry out their mission. That’s why if you order a novel set in Tanzania, the next time you log on to the site where you bought it, it will suggest that you might also want to order the book Say it in Swahili.
Thus, it seems inevitable that a novel called The German Woman , set in Europe at the end of both world wars, a book, moreover, that involves espionage, traitors, bombings and love affairs, is going to be compared to Graham Greene, John Le Carré, Alan Furst, Sebastian Faulks, Michael Ondaatje, Pat Barker and, if the blurber really knows his literary spy stuff, perhaps even Eric Ambler. Three of the above do in fact appear on the dust jacket of Paul Griner’s The German Woman .
To find out which three, you’ll have to buy the book, and it will be well worth the price to do so. But in truth, Griner’s writing stakes out its own territory. Besides, when you really study it, how much is any of these writers’ style like that of the others? Ondaatje’s prose can be as obfuscating as Greene’s is lucid; Furst’s can be as superficial as Barker’s is profound. And sometimes (just sometimes) you want to shout at Le Carré to cut to the chase already!
No reader will want to admonish Griner to cut to the chase. His technique has always been one of pared-down incisiveness, his characters acutely observed, his subject matter gritty and graphic.graphic.

To find out which three, you’ll have to buy the book, and it will be well worth the price to do so. But in truth, Griner’s writing stakes out its own territory. Besides, when you really study it, how much is any of these writers’ style like that of the others? Ondaatje’s prose can be as obfuscating as Greene’s is lucid; Furst’s can be as superficial as Barker’s is profound. And sometimes (just sometimes) you want to shout at Le Carré to cut to the chase already!

No reader will want to admonish Griner to cut to the chase. His technique has always been one of pared-down incisiveness, his characters acutely observed, his subject matter gritty and graphic . . .

Griner immerses us in the post-war German world with such convincing detail that it’s almost impossible to believe that the author did not live through the events himself, right down to the boots on Kate’s feet and her experience inside a Dada nightclub. Yet never does The German Woman have the feel of an over-researched historical novel — those doorstops into which it seems the author packed every note he ever took. Just the opposite: The writing here is so smooth that it feels almost as if you are watching a film. (It cannot be coincidence that Griner chose to make Claus a filmmaker.) At the same time, it goes beyond what film can do by illuminating the way that war gets inside every person who lives through it — and stays there, taking up residence like an indestructible parasite. “Slaughter isn’t virtuous,” Kate reminds Claus. Not then, not ever.

Now for the inevitable comparison. (I’m sorry, but I have to do it.) If there’s anyone whose work Griner’s here resembles it is William Boyd — a novelist who can take you absolutely anywhere, never wastes a sentence, and, most impressive of all, understands the beating heart of a woman.”

Kirkus Reviews:
From the bloody aftermath of World War I to the somber streets of London under Nazi attack, this intelligent epic fuses romance, disaster, historical analysis and poetic observation. Kate Zweig’s husband, a German surgeon, was blinded by a bomb on the eastern front in 1919, and when he died, Kate turned hard—and hardy. Griner (Collectors, 2001, etc.) examines divided loyalties and the exigencies of survival through the eyes of this English-born nurse—bold, beautiful, astute. Loyal to her husband in WWI, she’d witnessed horrors—a priest shot pointblank by marauding Reds; field hospital barbarism (bags of salt sewn into wounds). Then, in 1944 London, a new love arrives—Claus Murphy, American filmmaker of Irish and German descent. His complicated past includes being jailed as a traitor for making a movie about the American Revolution that, revealing real-life British atrocities, threatened the U.K./U.S. alliance. Claus suspects the refugee Kate of pro-Nazi sympathies (she decries the Allied bombing of German civilians) but is soon taken with her subtle and principled politics, courage and air of mysterious sadness. By night, he’s an air warden, pulling bodies from the wreckage of bombed buildings; by day, for the Ministry of Information, he feeds the Nazis lies about D-Day and crafts British propaganda films. The two bond over tales of trauma: his dad, a shopkeeper beaten by anti-Kaiser goons; her vivid remembrance of wartime agony (“the sunken eyes and cyanotic lips of the cholera victims; the lilting babble of typhus sufferers”). As the two connect, they negotiate the minefields of their histories—histories as messy and moving as those of all combat survivors. Complex, authentic and compelling.

Publisher’s Weekly:
Griner’s second novel (after Collectors) is a gritty, unsentimental story of love and loyalty played out across Europe during the two World Wars. It begins with Kate Zweig, a nurse, working at a crumbling field hospital in Prussia with her doctor husband. Shortly, their hospital is destroyed by Russian soldiers during WWI, and after the pair are captured and tortured, a sympathetic Russian officer arranges for their covert escape into Germany. Jump to WWII London, where Claus, aka “Charles Murphy,” an American filmmaker of Irish and German lineage, serves as a neighborhood warden while ostensibly working for the British Ministry of Information. In truth, he has been recruited as a spy for Britain. Or has he? Claus meets Kate in Hyde Park, and thereafter Griner knits together a multifarious plot that calls into question collaboration versus loyalty: to homeland, to humanity, to family and to lovers. Griner is unflinching in his depictions of battlefield atrocity (a conscious soldier with an exposed-brain injury appears on the first page), offering a sober grounding for the cerebral exploration of collaboration and betrayal. Fans of Graham Greene or Alan Furst will want to take a look.