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New book out August 19, 2025
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A darkly comic spy novel and madcap adventure story set in the Asian Pacific and San Francisco during the 1939-1940 World's Fair and the outbreak of the Second World War.
Richard Halifax, daredevil traveler and boys' adventure writer of the breeziest of prose, has vanished at sea while attempting to sail a custom-built Chinese junk across the Pacific. Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, his machinations live on in those whose lives are upended by his disappearance. Told in a braided narrative of three distinct voices-- including Halifax's letters from the lost voyage, as well as those of Austrian émigré painter Hildegard Rauch and British intelligence officer Simon Faulk, both picking up the pieces in California-- the threads come together in a propulsive, quixotic tale that explores the many forms of shipwreck, exile, betrayal, and the stories we tell ourselves in the fight to survive.
Named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and best historical fiction of the year by Crime Reads, The Torqued Man is a brilliant debut novel, at once teasing literary thriller and a darkly comic blend of history and invention, set in wartime Berlin and propelled by two very different but equally mesmerizing voices: a German spy handler and his Irish secret agent, neither of whom are quite what they seem.
"Mann’s sometimes graphic, sometimes heartbreaking, always entertaining thriller draws parallels to similar forces pulling against each other in modern life.”
— Washington Post
“Highly entertaining. . . . The two stories contained within . . . fit together like the teeth of a zipper, one atop the other, until the whole thing is satisfyingly pulled into place.” — San Francisco Chronicle
"Clever genre elements and felicitous prose? Oh yes; this novel is the elusive cake that you are allowed to both have and eat." -- Molly Young, New York Times
Peter Mann
Peter Mann is the author of the novels THE TORQUED MAN (Harper, 2022) and WORLD PACIFIC (Harper, 2025). A longtime resident of San Francisco, he grew up in Kansas City, went to Wesleyan University, studied in Salamanca, Copenhagen, and Berlin, and earned a PhD in Modern European history before realizing that he wanted to be a novelist and a cartoonist.
A past recipient of the Whiting fellowship and writer-in -residence at the Hemingway House, he currently teaches literature and history at Stanford. He also draws comics, which you can find on his Substack newsletter THE QUIXOTE SYNDROME, featuring errant sallies in history, literature, and the absurd. Or get a full blast of his graphic mania at pmannia.com