Toby Barlow’s Babayaga is out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and follows the travels of a CIA agent posing as an ad executive CIA agent in Europe in the 1950s. What begins as a relatively straightforward operation quickly becomes something bigger, and weirder. Read an excerpt from the novel and see for yourself.
What you might not know are the life events that inspired Barlow’s story. Read on as the author tells us a tale about his grandfather, waiting on a German train in 1937….
Check out Toby Barlow’s Babayaga, available August 6th from Farrar, Straus and Giroux! If you’re in NYC, be sure to check out Toby Barlow in conversation with Sean McDonald at McNally Jackson Books on August 7th.
Will is a young American ad executive in Paris. Except his agency is a front for the CIA. It’s 1959 and the cold war is going strong. Zoya is a beautiful young woman wandering les boulevards, sad-eyed, coming off a bad breakup. In fact, she impaled her ex on a spike… Inspector Vidot is a hardworking Paris police detective who finds himself turned into a flea. Oliver is a patrician, fun-loving American who has come to Paris to start a literary journal with the help of friends in D.C.
Add a few chance encounters, a chorus of angry witches, a strung-out jazzman or two, a weaponized LSD program, and a cache of rifles buried in the Bois de Bologne—and that’s a novel! But while Toby Barlow’s Babayaga may start as just a joyful romp though the City of Light, it quickly grows into a daring, moving exploration of love, mortality, and responsibility.
