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A darkly comic novel of intrigue, adventure, and the perils of self-invention set in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific during the outbreak of the Second World War.

In 1939, just as the clouds of war are gathering, Richard Halifax— boys' adventure writer of manly bravado and the breeziest of prose styles—vanishes in the Pacific. Halifax was attempting to sail a Chinese junk from Hong Kong to San Francisco as part of the World’s Fair festivities on Treasure Island. But while his disappearance upends the lives of those left in his wake back home, both his machinations and his letters to his young readers live on.

 

Hildegard Rauch, an émigré painter and the daughter of Germany’s greatest living writer in exile, finds her twin brother in a coma after an attempted suicide. He left a mysterious note that sends her on a search for the truth about her brother’s relationship with Richard Halifax and the dangerous secret he entrusted to the writer before his voyage.

 

Simon Faulk, a British intelligence officer, has been assigned to ferret out Nazi spies in California. He learns of the arrival of a mysterious American agent from across the Pacific, part of a joint German-Japanese operation.

Told in the alternating voices of these three characters, set against the growing threat of another world war and a World’s Fair dedicated to peace, World Pacific is a madcap quixotic tale that explores the many forms of shipwreck, exile, betrayal, and the stories we tell ourselves in the fight to stay afloat. 

My Books

Named a New Yorker Best Book of 2022 and best historical fiction of the year by Crime Reads, The Torqued Man is at once a 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

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“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 

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About

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

In the press

In The Press

“‘Vexing’ doesn’t begin to describe the intricate maneuverings of the two narrators in Peter Mann’s quick-witted World War II caper. But ‘compelling’ certainly does.”

Alida Becker

The New York Times Book Review

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