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Munich cover art

Munich

By: Robert Harris
Narrated by: David Rintoul
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Summary

From the best-selling author of Fatherland, Conclave and An Officer and a Spy.

September 1938. Hitler is determined to start a war. Chamberlain is desperate to preserve the peace. The issue is to be decided in a city that will forever afterwards be notorious for what takes place there....

Munich.

As Chamberlain's plane judders over the Channel and the Führer's train steams relentlessly south from Berlin, two young men travel with secrets of their own. Hugh Legat is one of Chamberlain's private secretaries; Paul Hartmann a German diplomat and member of the anti-Hitler resistance. Great friends at Oxford before Hitler came to power, they haven't seen one another since they were last in Munich six years earlier. Now, as the future of Europe hangs in the balance, their paths are destined to cross again.

When the stakes are this high, who are you willing to betray? Your friends, your family, your country or your conscience?

©2017 Robert Harris (P)2017 Random House Audiobooks

What listeners say about Munich

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

excellent, shame a key passage was missing!

Very enjoyable novel. Not Robert Harris's best but still a fascinating and gripping read. One complaint: this so-called unabridged recording is missing the crucial meeting between our German protagonist and Neville Chamberlain. I was thrown when characters were referencing a pivotal scene that I hadn't heard read; and when the German protagonist is leaving a location i never heard him arrive at. After thumbing through a hard copy of the novel, this scene occurs between Audible chapters 20 and 21: after the British explain to the Czechs the outcome of the agreement, and before Hartmann "leaves the hotel and suspects he is being followed". Sort it out, Audible! This is a crucial scene, the climax of the novel and what our protagonists are trying to do - without this scene the protagonists seem hugely ineffectual and their story arc is missing something vital!

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145 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

A Piece For Our Time?

To an extent you know what you're going to get with Robert Harris's historical fiction. There's always going to be a strong feeling of time and place based on thoroughly detailed research. You're going to find characters given real depth whether they be genuine historical personalities or the the fictional ones that Harris uses to carry the story. All of that is true here in a novel that I found highly satisfying to listen to even if it didn't hit the heights of excitement.

There is a dual aspect to the story in that two old college friends find themselves on opposite sides of the conference with both playing their own high stakes games. The book provides a brief but extremely important episode in their lives and the history of Europe. To me it felt as much like a docudrama as a fictional novel as the plot stuck so closely to historical fact.

The narration by David Rintoul is steady with no attempt to give the non-British characters any kind of national accents. It feels entirely appropriate to the text with perhaps the only element of real theatre coming late on with some of Hitler's outbursts.

Harris is clearly scratching some kind of itch here. He is returning to the subject of a documentary he made almost 30 years ago and he portrays Chamberlain with considerably more sympathy than many historians. The quality of the writing is, as you would expect from this author, is extremely high. I don't think it's the most thrilling of thrillers but it is a good story with a very authentic feeling atmosphere to it.

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59 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Earlier reviewers are right - key section of text is missing from this audio book

I was very much enjoying this book until the last hour when it became clear that an important section of the text is missing from the recording, leaving me totally confused. Earlier reviewers have noted the same thing. Audible should put this right or remove the title from sale.

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47 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Is a part missing

Towards the end it would seem that a section of the book has been missed!Otherwise I would it give it all5's

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16 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Gripping account of a pivotal moment in history

I greatly enjoyed this book that combines fiction with the recorded facts about a crucial few days in 1938: days that could have changed the course of history. Though Chamberlain is the sympathetically portrayed central figure, the story is told through the eyes of two fictional characters, Hugh Legat, a Foreign Office employee seconded to the Prime Minister’s staff, and Paul von Hartmann, a Germany diplomat, whom Legat knew when both were students at Oxford university.

The author obviously relied on a large body of evidence but converted this into a gripping story. Neville Chamberlain was unlucky in having to negotiate with Hitler, a despot hell-bent on dominating Europe. I recently listened to Mein Kampf, which I learn was not translated competently into English until recently so the message was not considered by the British government before the outbreak of war. Had they done so they would have realised that Hitler would not be content merely acquiring Sudetenland, but had ambitions for a much greater ‘Lebensraum’.

In an extraordinary turnaround, Chamberlain was transformed from the hero of the hour when he returned with his piece of paper, which he naively thought was a guarantee of “peace in our time”, only shortly after to be humiliated by Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia and his reputation sullied for every more. The author has been criticised as an apologist for Chamberlain, but one has to appreciate that Chamberlain’s generation had experienced the horrors of the First World War and would go to any lengths to stop another war.

David Rintoul is an excellent narrator for this kind of book. Happily he doesn’t give the Germans and French funny accents.

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7 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Great book, well read

Thoroughly enjoyed this. Really bought the tube and the characters to life, and kept the attention.

Others have complained about a missing section with the meeting between Chamberlain and another character. It was there in its entirety, so if it had been a problem, it’s now fixed.

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4 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

just not engaging .

A story that dragged on. Characters were well rounded but the whole thing was a struggle to finish . I gave up about 4 chapters before the end.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Lamentably some times peace is not posible.


When we give power to monsters to shake up the status quo we risk the imperfect balance and deliver our world into chaos and war, but we never learn because we still believe in easy solutions for complex problems, cancer cured with a coffee enema, a prayer for peace instead of working for peace, having more children for economic growth while destroying the planet and blaming the other, hurricanes devastate large parts of the world within a year but we need to use more fossil fuels while expanding our population, add a little more prayer and it all should work out, put a clown in charge he knows how to shake it up.
Sixty million people died in a conflict without equal one man tried to build a little peace against all odds, he was wrong, claim all the clairvoyants of the future they always know what was best after the fact.
A fascinating book that reflects on our predicaments by looking at a crucial moment in time without the second-guessing of those that are judging with all the lessons from the past on their table.

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3 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Poor Ending

Enjoyable listen and well narrated, but a poor ending, almost as though the author was tired of writing and prematurely ended it all!

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2 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Takes us heart-stoppingly back in time

Robert Harris writes with his inimitable fluency and ease, effortlessly he carries his reader with him through a very tense moment in our history. Narration is first class. Terrific book, and terrific audio book especially!

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2 people found this helpful