In the cold October of 1917 Margaretha Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, sits in a prison cell in Paris awaiting trial. She is accused of spying for Germany during World War I, and her penalty, if convicted, will be death by firing squad. As she waits, burdened by a secret guilt, Mata Hari tells stories, like Scheherazade, to buy back her life from her interrogators.From a bleak childhood on the shifting, sandy shores of the North Sea, through a loveless marriage to a Dutch naval officer, Margaretha is transported to the forbidden sensual pleasure of the southern oceans. In the chill of her prison cell she spins tales of rosewater baths and native lovers, goddesses and sirens and Javanese jungles hung with frangipani, evoking the magical world that sustained her even as her family crumbled. And then, in flight from her husband, Margaretha reinvents herself: she becomes an artist's model, a circus rider, and finally the temple dancer Mata Hari, dressed in veils and hung with bells, admired by Diaghilev, performing for the crowned heads of Europe. Of all the stories she tells, those about her beloved daughter, Non, are what most sustain her.Yannick Murphy's doomed Mata Hari, clever, cultural, and an incurable romantic, is both a real woman and a palimpsest on which each may write his dream. Through her many transformations, her life's fatal question - was she a traitor, and if so, why? - burns ever brighter. Read Less