Munich

By: Robert Harris

Narrated by: David Rintoul

Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

September 1938.

Hitler is determined to start a war. Chamberlain is desperate to preserve the peace.

The issue is to be decided in a city that will forever afterwards be notorious for what takes place there. Munich.

As Chamberlain’s plane judders across the Channel and the Fürher’s train steams relentlessly south from Berlin, two young men travel with secrets of their own. Hugh Legat is one of Chamberlain’s private secretaries, Paul Hartmann a German diplomat and member of the anti-Hitler resistance. Great friends at Oxford before Hitler came to power, they haven’t seen one another since they were last in Munich together six years earlier. Now, as the future of Europe hangs in the balance, their paths are destined to cross again.

When the stakes are this high, who are you willing to betray? Your friends, your family, your country or your conscience?

©2017 Robert Harris (P)2017 Penguin Random House Canada

Critic reviews

“Highly readable.... [E]ven more of a cracking good yarn than the real-life version.” (Jack Batten, Toronto Star)

“[A] nail-biting suspense novel that shines a whole new light on grey old Neville Chamberlain. In Harris’s clever plot, appeasement seems not only sensible but noble, albeit eighty years after the fact.... [T]he thrill here is in the minute details of diplomatic work and in Harris’s stunning reconstruction of how it all might have been. I couldn’t put it down.” (Margaret Cannon, The Globe and Mail)

“[A] brilliantly imagined thriller.... Harris’s cleverness, judgment and eye for detail are second to none. Because he writes with such apparent effortlessness, it is easy to underestimate his achievement, but his research is so impeccable that he could have cut all the spy stuff and published Munich as a history book. His portrait of Hitler, for instance - lazy, rude, sulking furiously at the German crowds’ enthusiasm for Chamberlain, reeking of sweat like a ‘workman who had not bathed or changed his shirt for a week’ - is as good as anything you will find in Ian Kershaw’s definitive biography. The real star, though, is Chamberlain. Indeed, Harris’s treatment of Britain’s most maligned prime minister is so powerful, so persuasive, that it ranks among the most moving fictional portraits of a politician I have ever read.” (The Sunday Times)

Missing something

There’s a chapter missing from the recording. One of the moments of high drama missing. It’s not the end of the world, the book is good, the narrator is very good, but there is definitely one chapter missing. Which is too bad.