The World Is Round — John T. Cullen

This historical thriller spans fifty years from 1942 to 1992, filled with passion, love, war, and many surprises. Marianne has long yearned for her long-lost father, who stole the atomic bomb from Stalin and, with this two wives, helped save the world. After the Soviet Union collapses in 1991, it's like a sea receding, a tide going out, to expose the secrets of a lost half century. Starting in early 1990s Paris, a wealthy countess (Marianne) begins a global search for keys to her complex and dark past. She is fiftyish, widowed, still beautiful and elegant after a life of turbulent adventures, love, loss, and tragedy. Now she sets it all aside to search for the two keys to her lost past and her identity: who were her parents? Her mother lies buried on an isolated seashore in a small town in Siberia. That's where Stalin hoped to lure Marianne's father around 1950 to exact a horrible revenge for preventing the USSR from stealing an atomic bomb off a dock in 1945 San Francisco. Marianne, conceived in San Francisco but born in Siberia, yearns to know her mother's true identity from among the women in her father's romantic life. Her even more mysterious father is shrouded in secrecy, except his name: Tim Nordhall, a young U.S. Navy intelligence officer during World War Two. When Marianne in 1992 unravels the true story of Tim Nordhall, she also learns the tragic story of her beautiful and heroic mother. Grownup Marianne stands on a foggy 1992 San Francisco shore. Amid memories of love and war, she gazes across the Pacific Ocean and half a century of time, to remember a four year old orphan staring back from a Siberian beach toward her future self. The world is round indeed. The World is Round: Memories of Love and War evokes sweeping sagas like Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, and the vividly peopled sagas of Sidney Sheldon or Herman Wouk. The story covers half the 20 Century, several continents, and the two greatest wars in human history-World War Two and the Cold War. We follow the remarkable adventures and loves of Tim Nordhall from Africa to London to San Francisco; and his daughter's path decades later to unravel the mysteries of her own past. Along the way, we meet a host of lesser but all the more vivid characters, including some historically famous persons including OSS Director Wild Bill Donovan and Nazi U-Boat captain Johann Heinrich Fehler (U-234, commissioned to carry atomic bomb parts to Tokyo to unleash on Los Angeles and other U.S. cities). By chance, in one of many tiny cameo moments in this novel, we spot an obscure, unknown young U.S. Navy officer named Richard M. Nixon eating lunch at a San Francisco hotel on Nob Hill in 1945. One phantom shadowing the story every step is a triple agent of Stalin, named Jaguar - who is not only be a spy, a murderer, and an assassin - but also a scholar of poetry and philosophy. He sparred with Tim Nordhall, stealthily followed the U-234 atomic bomb material from New Hampshire to San Francisco in 1945, and ultimately holds the truth about Tim Nordhall, and the women in Tim's life, including two wives and a beautiful Polish spy; one of whom is Marianne's lost and loving mother. Like all classic espionage suspense stories, and historical novels, this historical thriller moves like a cunning and relentless agent through wartime London of the Blitz, and San Francisco in 1945. The narratie propels us through cities of fog and drizzle, through jungles filled with uranium mines and mercenaries, to shores of seas illumined by galaxies of starlight. Enigmatic truth lies with a small girl, holding her mother's hand on a beach in Siberia, looking east toward another beach in San Francisco half a century later, where a graying French countess stands looking westward to her own past and her own self as a tiny child. The unbridgeable chasm of time remains dark and void - only a faint light of truth says: our lives make a circle; the world is round.