V2

A Novel of World War II

By: Robert Harris

Narrated by: David Rintoul

Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times Best Seller

From the best-selling author of Fatherland and Munich comes a WWII thriller about a German rocket engineer, a former actress turned British spy, and the Nazi rocket program.

The first rocket will take five minutes to hit London. You have six minutes to stop the second. 

Rudi Graf is an engineer who always dreamed of sending rockets to the moon. But instead, he finds himself working alongside Wernher von Braun, launching V2 rockets at London for the Nazis from a bleak seaside town in occupied Holland. As the SS increases its scrutiny of the project, Graf, an engineer more than a soldier, has to muster all of his willpower to toe the party line. And when rumors of a defector circulate through the German ranks, Graf becomes a prime suspect. 

Meanwhile, Kay Caton-Walsh, a young English intelligence officer, is living through the turmoil of war. After she and her lover, an RAF officer, are caught in a V2 attack, she volunteers to ship out for newly liberated Belgium. Armed with little more than a slide rule and a few equations, Kay and her colleagues hope to locate and destroy the launch sites. But at this stage in the war, it’s hard to know who, if anyone, she can trust. 

As the death toll soars, these twin stories play out against the background of the German missile campaign during the Second World War. And what the listener comes to understand is that Kay’s and Graf’s destinies are on a collision course.

©2020 Robert Harris (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Engrossing.... Harris brings the past to life through vivid characterizations and clever plotting. Fans of superior historical fiction will be rewarded." (Publishers Weekly)

"A veteran historical novelist homes in on one of Hitler’s last desperate hopes.... [An] enjoyable thriller with plenty of well-researched historical nuggets." (Kirkus Reviews)

"[An] historical-fiction master.... Crosscutting between those launching the rockets and those on the receiving end proves to be a superb narrative device.... [This] novel combines fascinating technical detail with a wartime drama that finds human ambiguity on both sides of the battlefield." (Booklist)

Ho-Hum

Could have been a decent book but it lacks suspense and character development. After a few chapters you don't care if they all get blown up. In spite of the marketing blurb, little new information on the V-2 is revealed beyond what can be found on Wikipedia and other web sources. The author seems undecided whether to write a historical novel or a non-fiction documentary and story falls lifeless between the two. The ending is rushed and unsatisfactory. In reality there was considerable more intrigue involved with the allies' capture of Von Braun and all the V-2 hardware and data than indicated in the book. As explained in the afterword, the novel was written in COVID-19 isolation, which apparently also applied to any meaningful interface between author and editor.

Harris delivers again

Robert Harris is one of the best historical fiction writers today and he delivers again. The twin stories of the German scientist and the British WAC officer is nuanced and gripping. Though we know how this story ends, Harris never rushes and keeps the characters real. His portrayal of VonBraun is delicious.

Good story, great narration

David Rintoul's narration is so excellent he can make a bad story pretty good. But this is a good story that Rintoul makes into a great audio book. I just wish it were a little longer.

Not Harris's best

This is not Harris at his best. The plot is threadbare with a phony contrived ending. The facts about the V2 are interesting but the story is pure formula -- and not a very good one at that..

A bit soporific

I listened to this while I had COVID. Perfect because I kept falling asleep. When I woke, each time I’d discover what I missed hardly mattered. Still the story and history were interesting; just too much detail. The time sequence of the German story was hard to follow as we were taken back abruptly to earlier in the war and then returned to the days of the story.

This was a dreadful book…

This dreadful book provides too much detail on the boring and unimportant backstories of its principal and even peripheral characters .

The meat of the story itself is as misery as that which made up WW2 food rations..

All of which made it a very boring book.

On of Harris’s best

A great “listen”. Keeps you in the car, listening, after you’ve gotten to where you’re going.

Intriguing and Compelling

Robert Harris' brilliant story draws you into the world of the German V2 project and the lives of two people on opposite sides of the War, whose destinies become intertwined. I finished this in one day because I could not stop listening/reading. An absolute page turner. David Rintoul's performance of this story was masterful.

An absolute gem of historical fiction

So glad I ignored the negative or lukewarm reviews. I guess if you were expecting, I dunno, some blockbuster high-tension thriller with car chases and gunfights, you'd be disappointed. But that's not the kind of writer Harris is. Thank God. This is an exquisitely plotted, beautifully realistic and detailed realization of a short but highly significant period in the war. The two very human protagonists, one a British WAAF, the other one of the German engineers working on the V2, travel down separate pathways that finally converge in the last pages in a very satisfying way. A number of secondary characters are also delineated and add to the depth of the story. Harris is a master of deft, economical characterization. Von Braun is here too, but as a secondary character, though obviously his presence is felt throughout the V2 project scenes. Harris manages the difficult trick of making him a vivid and complex character while pursuing a storyline in which someone else is the main focus of interest. David Rintoul's narration is perfectly paced and first-rate, carrying you easily through the story and never distracting from it.

This is genre-writing of the highest literary calibre, at the level of a John Le Carré. If you were expecting a blockbuster suspense thriller, well, sorry, but if you appreciate historical fiction executed at the highest level of the art, rendered by a very sensitive and listenable narrator, I would urge you not to turn aside from this novel based on some of the (to me bafflingly) lukewarm reviews.

NOT for ME

Were I asked to imagine a dull novel about spies and the development of the infamous V2, I could never imagine one as pedantic and dull as this. There is NO story, NO drama, and NO developed characters. On the other hand, this is not entirely unusual for this author. Reader David Rintoul does the novelist justice reading the words, line by line, page by page, chapter by chapter, as uninterestingly as they were written.