The new novel from the author of the highly acclaimed The Butchers
of Berlin, soon to be a TV seriesBerlin, July 1944, a world of
illicit jazz clubs, sexually generous young women, suspect art
dealers, last-ditch zealots and a city defined by crumbling
infrastructure, advanced terror, dirty secrets and deep politics -
and then there is August Schlegel, caught askance in a web of
totalitarian mayhem. Everybody knows what happened on 20 July:
Fuhrer Adolf Hitler miraculously survived an assassination attempt
when a bomb failed to kill him. Schlegel, a reluctant employee of
the Gestapo, finds himself in the foolhardy position of questioning
the official version, knowing it is the last thing he should be
thinking. Was it a propaganda stunt, or a deception or was
something more extreme going on, perhaps a cover-up connected to
the mysterious burning down of a Berlin clinic? A deadly political
dance takes Schlegel all the way up to Party Secretary Martin
Bormann, the Chancellory's sinister 'black pope'. Information is
controlled, informers are everywhere, secrecy remains the
cornerstone of the regime, yet someone appears interested in
digging up a carefully buried scandal in the Fuhrer's past private
life, an incestuous affair with his young niece that ended
mysteriously in 1931. Rumours circulate of a 'Hitler confession'.
Trapped in a kingdom of lies, Schlegel discovers the blighted
present and a censored past are connected in ways he could never
have imagined. The niece's tragic end is intimately bound up with
the fate of his long-lost father, whom Schlegel had always believed
absconded to Argentina and died there, until he finds a private
1925 edition of Mein Kampf, dedicated to 'Anton Schlegel', signed,
'In eternal gratitude, Adolf Hitler.' The identity of Schlegel's
father - and whether he is still alive and operating as a secret
puppet master - becomes inseparable from the enigma of a
shapeshifting Fuhrer, going back to the early days when he was
known to Anton Schlegel as Herr Wolf. Questioning the official
version of events, Chris Petit offers a dazzling reinterpretation
of history, showing how the deeper secret truths invariably turn
out to be personal. Praise for Chris Petit: 'No denying the book's
power' Nick Rennison, Sunday Times 'The real skill of this
rigorous, disturbing novel lies in the way Petit steadily and
unsensationally allows his protagonists to discover the full horror
of the hellhole they are in' Guardian 'One of Britain's most
visionary writers' David Peace 'Powerful evocation of a city living
in terror' Sunday Times Crime Club 'Ambitious, darkly atmospheric'
The Times 'Hugely impressive and highly readable; in the tradition
of Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs' Financial Times
'Ferocious invention marks this novel out as special' The Edge
'Ambitious and intelligent' Times 'Puts Petit in the first rank'
Metro 'A zigzagging narrative as byzantine an blackly pessemistic
as late James Ellroy' Independent on Sunday 'An example of the
genre near its best. Gorky Park with something to spare; well worth
anyone's weekend' Guardian for The Psalm Killer
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