A gripping account of the negotiations between Britain and Germany in 1938 before the outbreak of war, Robert Harris’s thriller – which has now been adapted into a film starring Jeremy Irons – focuses on the backrooms of power and peripheral figures working to avert catastrophe. At the centre of the story is Hugh Legat, a civil servant who, at the start of the novel, is dragged away from an anniversary lunch with his wife for a meeting at No 10.
Events take place over four tense days at the end of September, during which the prime minister Neville Chamberlain goes to Munich for talks with Hitler, who is intent on invading Czechoslovakia. On his return, Chamberlain famously stepped off the plane waving a written assurance of peace from the Führer, a moment that would come to stain his reputation. This is no alternative history in the manner of Harris’s Fatherland, though there are heavily fictionalised elements including Legat and his friendship with Paul von Hartmann, an old chum from Oxford who is now a diplomat at the Nazi foreign ministry.
