Villa Air-Bel

'Rosemary Sullivan knows that you can understand nothing about a place without listening to individual people and their stories'
'Rosemary Sullivan's Villa Air-Bel is a marvellous addition to the surging literature on occupied France. Sullivan writes . . . as a dramatist. Her scene-by-scene evocation of life at the house reads like an updated Chekhov comedy laced with horror'
'Sullivan brilliantly interweaves personal histories with terrifying tales about flight over mountains to Spain or Switzerland and by sea to Casablanca and Martinique, and with stories of forging papers, bribery, love and betrayal'
'Part history, part adventure story... the product of much devoted research and wide reading. Interesting, important, and her telling... gripping. Sullivan's book is full of interest, of good stories, of nice character sketches. She handles the huge cast she has assembled deftly, and her enthusiasm is obvious'
'This is a magnificent, complex narrative of courage, folly and complacency.' -- Jane Stevenson, Daily Telegraph, who, as the subtitle read, was 'captivated by the story of a Harvard classical scholar who rescued Europe's intellectuals from the Nazis'
'With tremendous suspense and emotional pull, Sullivan recounts the little-known story of Varian Fry'
'[A] fascinating history'
'Beautifully written in a style that is novelistic, Villa Air-Bel brings to life the story of this rescue through experiences of a community of artists who spent time in the Villa Air-Bel chateau ...The book is interesting and evocative and provides nuances and texture to one of the untold stories of rescue during the Holocaust'
'A complex tale showing how hope and courage flourish, even in the toxic soil of totalitarianism'
'...a true tale full of intrigue, danger, crazed love, death and survival ...The debt of modern culture to the motley crowd at the Villa Air-Bel is truly incalculable'

France, 1940. The once glittering boulevards of Paris teem with spies, collaborators, and the Gestapo now that France has fallen to Hitler's Wermacht. For André Breton, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, and scores of other cultural elite who have been denounced as enemies of the Third Reich the fear of imminent arrest, deportation, and death defines their daily life. Their only salvation is the Villa Air-Bel, a château outside Marseille where a group of young people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep them alive.
A powerfully told, meticulously researched true story filled with suspense, drama, and intrigue, Villa Air-Bel delves into a fascinating albeit hidden saga in our recent history. It is a remarkable account of how a diverse intelligentsia—intense, brilliant, and utterly terrified—was able to survive one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.

ROSEMARY SULLIVAN, the author of fifteen books, is best known for her recent biography Stalin's Daughter. Published in twenty-three countries, it won the Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and was a finalist for the PEN /Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Her book Villa Air-Bel was awarded the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History. She is a professor emeritus at the university of Toronto and has lectured in Canada, the U.S., Europe, India, and Latin America.