Published by Chiselbury
Two men face each other across the kitchen table of a lodge deep in the woods of southern Austria — one has a gun on the other. One is a fugitive Nazi. The other has come to bring him to justice.
Between them lies a gun — and the ghosts of a war that refuses to die. While the one with the gun decides whether or not to kill his captive, they tell each other their war stories.
And so, we journey across a vast and epic landscape of conflict.
ISBN: 9781917837408 (hardback)
Also available as an e-book
…from the 1941 blitz that tore the heart out of a British city… through the fury and misery of the battle for Monte Cassino in 1944… the Eastern Front of 1943 during the savage struggle between Hitler’s legions and Stalin’s troops… mind games in occupied Prague… Berlin reeling under Allied bomber raids… a death march from Hungary into Austria in 1945… and into the early years of the Cold War, in which former allies view each other with suspicion and begin a new deadly dance.
Universal truths about the human condition are examined in an epic historical thriller of conscience and survival across a vast canvas — where the line between hero and villain blurs in the ashes of war, and there are twists and turns right up to the very end.
Hearts and souls are plunged into the fire and fury of a struggle between good and evil. The Second World War is over — but the pursuit of the guilty has only just begun.
Iain Ballantyne has written a gripping novel of love, betrayal and espionage spanning the years of the Second World War. Martin’s Eyes is John Le Carré meets Alistair MacLean.
Gavin Mortimer
author of Stirling’s Men & The Phoney Major
An impressive and highly ambitious debut. The detail is superb, the characters are compelling and the action is relentless.
Alexander Norman
author of Captain de Havilland’s Moth
This is an ambitious and atmospheric novel of wartime intrigue and adventure. It hinges on a small number of characters you come to care about, and who consistently surprise right up to the final pages.
Phil Craig
author of 1945: The Reckoning
An unforgettable saga of converging destiny of captive and captor, set in the ruins of vengeance-torn Europe at war’s end.
Julian Stockwin
bestselling author of the Kydd series
Powerful and gripping — move over Len Deighton!
Robert Lyman
historian
Martin’s Eyes is a terrifically gripping WW2 novel. Beautifully written and wonderfully atmospheric — it tells a compelling tale of wartime life in all its aspects. Masterly!
Mark Ellis
author of the award-winning Frank Merlin WW2 detective series
Written with the flourish of a storyteller and the eye for detail and accuracy of a historian — a searing blend of war, crime, psychology and history.
Richard Hargreaves
author of Opening the Gates of Hell: Operation Barbarossa, June–July 1941
Iain Ballantyne perfectly captures the mood, chaos and ambiguity of the immediate post-war period on the Continent, taking the reader into a dark — and often forgotten — world.
Richard Hargreaves
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