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 closeβhe succeeds. But he could never have imagined the terrible consequences that would follow from this act of heroism.
Hermann GΓΆring, masterful 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. GΓΆring rushes the German scientific community into developing the atomic bomb, and in August 1944, this devastating new technology 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 Rothβs The Plot Against America, John Wyndhamβs The Chrysalids and Philip K. Dickβs cult classic The Man in the High Castle.