Review by Booklist Review
Sansom is known primarily for his series of historical novels featuring sixteenth-century lawyer Matthew Shardlake, but Winter in Madrid (2008), a spy thriller set in 1940, brought the author some serious acclaim. More is sure to follow with this gripping alternate-history story set in England in the early 1950s. David Fitzgerald, a civil servant, is a member of the Resistance, a group dedicated to expelling the Nazis from England (in Sansom's version of twentieth-century history, England surrendered to Hitler in May 1940). When David is given a very delicate assignment extricate scientist Frank Muncaster from a mental hospital before the Nazis discover the potentially world-altering secrets in Muncaster's possession he doesn't count on being pursued by a relentless Gestapo agent, Gunther Hoth, who will stop at nothing to silence Muncaster. A race-against-time thriller set against an imaginative and internally consistent historical backdrop, the novel should definitely appeal to fans of alternate history, especially the WWII novels of Harry Turtledove or Robert Conroy, and, of course, Robert Harris' classic Fatherland (1992).--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In the intriguing prologue of Sansom's solid what-if historical thriller, British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax succeeds Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on May 9, 1940, instead of Winston Churchill. Later that year, Britain makes peace with Germany. Flash forward to 1952. While the country is not technically under Nazi occupation, its citizens live in fear of speaking their minds, and Churchill heads a shadowy resistance movement. David Fitzgerald, a senior official in the Dominions Office, begins to rebel against his country's leadership after the tragic accidental death of his almost-three-year-old son, and is tapped to aid the resistance in a plan to free a scientist who carries a potentially world-changing secret. Sansom's prose is as assured as ever, but his plotting doesn't match that of his clever Elizabethan historicals (Dissolution, etc.). Fans of such Nazi triumphant novels as Len Deighton's SS-GB and Robert Harris's Fatherland will find this a satisfying, if more predictable read. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Neville Chamberlain's preferred successor as Britain's prime minister in May 1940 was his dour foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, not the brilliant but sometimes rash Winston Churchill. Sansom's new stand-alone (after Winter in Madrid) ponders what might have happened if Chamberlain had had his way: a surrendered Britain at peace following the fall of France and governed by the likes of Max Beaverbrook, Oswald Moseley, and other quislings under Hitler's thumb; a Nazi Germany still caught in a seemingly endless death struggle deep within the vastness of Russia; and a United States (under Adlai Stevenson!) still aloof from foreign entanglement. Sansom's alternative world feels genuine and includes delicious scenes such as a sappy, smiling Hitler riding down the Mall beside George VI in the golden State Coach while the stone-faced king bites his stiff upper lip. The protagonists include Frank Muncaster, the brother of an American-based nuclear scientist, attempting to deny Germany the secrets of the atomic bomb, civil servant (and spy for the English Resistance) David Fitzgerald, whose Jewish heritage must eventually affect his survival in a country slowly going mad, and Gestapo agent Gunther Hoth. VERDICT This speculative and intriguing thriller sucks readers into an alternative world that reveals its rewritten history only slowly, creating in us a page-turning craving for the details. Recommended for fans of World War II and totalitarian-era political fiction, history buffs, and those who enjoy alternative history generally. [See Prepub Alert, 7/29/13.]-Vicki Gregory, Sch. of Information, Univ. of South Florida, Tampa (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What did you do in the war, Pater--eh, Vater? Let's suppose, as Sansom does in this long, engaging bit of speculative fiction, that the Nazis had won the war. Or, perhaps more specifically, that they had stared the British down, won concessions from Lloyd George (who had "spent the thirties idolizing Hitler, calling him Germany's George Washington") and effectively made the United Kingdom a satellite of the Third Reich. Winston Churchill, pressed to join the Quisling government, instead spearheads a vee-for-victory resistance movement, while German racial purity laws gradually come into effect on the streets of London, with most residents only too glad to be rid of the Jews; meanwhile, critics of the regime, such as W.H. Auden and E.M. Forster, have been silenced. To judge by his name and appearance, David Fitzgerald should have no trouble in the new Britain, but his bloodline tells a different tale: "He knew that under the law he too should have worn a yellow badge, and should not be working in government service, an employment forbidden to Jews"--even half-Jews, even Irish Jews. His wife, for her part, is content at first to keep her head down and her mouth shut until the Final Solution comes to the sceptered isle. If there is hope, it will come from America, where, as one dour Brit remarks, "they love their superweapons, the Americans. Almost as bad as the Germans." Sansom's scenario is all too real, and it has sparked a modest controversy among it-couldn't-happen-here readers across the water. More important than the scenario is his careful unfolding of the vast character study that fascism affords, his portraits of those who resist and those who collaborate and why. That scenario, after all, is not new; Philip K. Dick, Len Deighton and Philip Roth have explored it, too. What matters is what is done with it, and Sansom has done admirably. A rich and densely plotted story that will make Winston Churchill buffs admire the man even more.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
