Shockwave

Countdown to Hiroshima

By: Stephen Walker

Narrated by: Colin Mace

Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

The New York Times best seller

At 8:15 a.m. on 6th August 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty-thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the city’s population died, by heat, by the blast and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare: radiation.

In this riveting account, Stephen Walker follows the stories of real people in the extraordinary weeks leading up to the explosion and in its aftermath. From the atomic engineer who armed the bomb in mid-air to the Japanese doctors treating thousands of burnt bodies on the ground. From the flight crews and scientists to world leaders and civilian victims. With intimate testimony and remarkable stories, this is the startling narrative behind the dawn of the atomic age.

©2020 Stephen Walker (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"Shockwave is a stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read." (Irish Times)

"This is an utterly gripping work of micro-history.... [Walker] proves himself a master of dramatic tension." (Sunday Express)

"The excitement of the time is wonderfully captured in Walker’s Shockwave. Brilliant." (Financial Times)