Parallel Paris is set in a Europe of today but one in which the Allies made a peace with Hitler in 1940, allowing the Axis Powers control over the European mainland. The central cast are four young people, Stephen, Dave, Geo and Helen, in their late teens and early twenties. Stephen is a leader, Dave, more introverted, follows him, Geo is weaker, wan, handsome, appealing, while Helen is brilliant and at great odds with herself over the morality of their actions. Their parents, all English by birth, have all been eliminated by the regime.
The book may be characterised as a pseudo-historical thriller, with a sexual tension running throughout which ignores the frontiers of political conviction. The story tells of the struggle of the gang for survival in the National Socialist State of France, the NSSF. They live between the interstices of the houses in the Parisian boulevards, “Parallel Paris”, and use the sewers and underground passages, with which Paris is riddled, to make their way about. The story line is one of a concentrated adventure but the book also explores the political and moral quandaries which beset the gang, with the Holocaust hovering in the shadows and sometimes openly emerging as relics of the past are uncovered.
