War story - Gwen Edelman

'Later he would say: I met you in a whorehouse. Or was it an all night poker game. I met you in a bookstore, Kitty would remind him. In a bookstore? Impossible. I never set foot in bookstores. What nonsense. I found you in a bordello. You were only fourteen. Thirty two. Then you lied about your age, you strumpet. How can I have anything to do with you? You monster, she murmured, tugging at his hair. He had always to find the better story.' Kitty meets Joseph in a New York bookstore. He is a famous playwright, an Austrian Jew who has survived the Holocaust, travelled the world and now, at sixty, lives in a faded, bohemian hotel in downtown Manhattan (a hotel he tells her, for madmen and artists). In his dusty, book-stacked room they begin an erotic and all consuming affair. Part monster, part victim, Joseph is egotistical, cruel, charming and brilliant. Day after day he spins for Kitty stories of his childhood in Amsterdam hiding from the Nazis, the triumphs and failures of his work, and, above all, the countless women he has adored, used - and left. One day, he assures her, he will leave her too WAR STORY is both the tale of an extraordinary passion and a stunning portrait of one man haunted by the ghosts of his past.