In November
1939, a German anti-fascist named Georg Elser came as close to assassinating
Adolf Hitler as anyone ever had. In this gripping novel of alternate history,
he doesn't just come close—he succeeds. But he could
never have imagined the terrible consequences that would follow from this act
of heroism.
Hermann
Göring, masterful political strategist, assumes the Chancellery and quickly signs a non-aggression treaty
with the isolationist president Joseph Kennedy that will keep America out of
the war that is about to engulf Europe. Göring rushes the German scientific
community into developing the atomic bomb, and in August 1944, this devastating
new weapon is tested on the English capital.
London
lies in ruins. The war is over, fascism prevails in Europe, and Canada, the
Commonwealth holdout in the Americas, suffers on as a client state of the
Soviet Union. Georg Elser, blinded in the A-bombing of London, is shipped to
Canada and quarantined in a hospice near Toronto called Mercy House. Here we
meet William Teufel, a German-Canadian boy who in the summer of 1960 devises a
plan that he hopes will distance himself from his German heritage and,
unwittingly, brings him face to face with the man whose astonishing act of
heroism twenty-one years earlier set the world on its terrifying new path.
In
this page-turning narrative, Bock has created an utterly compelling and
original novel of historical speculation in the vein of Philip Roth's The
Plot Against America, John Wyndham's The
Chrysalids and Philip K. Dick's cult classic The Man in the High Castle.