Fatherland: A Novel

Author: Robert Harris

As we've seen with Philip Roth, alternate history is a popular form with authors who would not normally be interested in writing science fiction, think, for instance, of MacKinlay Kantor's If the South had Won the Civil War or Len Deighton's SS-GB. But of all such novels, this is easily one of the best. Harris was a successful political journalist (one of his early books was about the exposure of the so-called Hitler Diaries as fake) who has used that knowledge and experience in his fiction. Most of his novels have been political (The Ghost) or straightforward historical (Enigma, Imperium), but his first novel combined the political and the historical into a superb alternate history. It is set in 1964, twenty years after Germany won the Second World War, and as Berlin prepares to celebrate Hitler's 75th birthday a policeman investigates the murder of a top party official. But as the investigation proceeds, he starts to uncover terrible secrets from the war that the party would rather he didn't reveal. This is everything a good alternate history should be, a gripping story and a convincing recreation of a victorious postwar Germany.