World Pacific

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 “Terrific . . . John le Carré meets Evelyn Waugh.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) Set in San Francisco and the Asian Pacific during the outbreak of the Second World War, a darkly comic novel of intrigue, adventure, and the perils of self-invention from the author of The Torqued Man. In 1939, boys’ adventure writer Richard Halifax vanishes in the Pacific while sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco as part of the World’s Fair festivities. 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, leaving behind a mysterious note that sends her searching 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 hunting Nazi spies in California, 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 whose fates intersect, 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.

Peter Mann is the author of the novel The Torqued Man, named one of The New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 and Best Historical Fiction of the year by CrimeReads. Originally from Kansas City, he is a longtime resident of San Francisco and teaches history and literature at Stanford. He also draws comics on his Substack newsletter The Quixote Syndrome.