Munich cover art

Munich

From the bestselling author of Conclave

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Munich

By: Robert Harris
Narrated by: David Rintoul
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £12.06

Buy Now for £12.06

Season's Savings | £0.99/mo for 3 months

£5.99/mo after 3 months - terms apply. Cancel monthly

'A brilliantly constructed spy novel' Observer

'Grips from start to finish ... Superb' Mail on Sunday

MUNICH, SEPTEMBER 1938

Hitler is determined to start a war. Chamberlain is desperate to preserve the peace.

They will meet in a city which forever afterwards will be notorious for what is about to take place.

As Chamberlain's plane judders over the channel and the Fuhrer's train steams south, two young men travel with their leaders. Former friends from a more peaceful time, they are now on opposing sides.

As Britain's darkest hour approaches, the fate of millions could depend on them - and the secrets they're hiding.

Spying. Betrayal. Murder. Is any price too high for peace?

 20th Century Espionage Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Political Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense War & Military Fiction Exciting Scary War Suspense
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

Critic reviews

Grips from start to finish . . . Munich captures the mood of the times: the suspicion and the fear, the political intrigue, the swagger of the Nazi machine and the widespread elation at the mistaken belief that war has been averted. Superb. (Simon Humphreys)
Harris’s cleverness, judgment and eye for detail are second to none . . . his research is so impeccable that he could have cut all the spy stuff and published Munich as a history book. Harris’s treatment of Britain’s most maligned prime minister is so powerful, so persuasive, that it ranks among the most moving fictional portraits of a politician that I have ever read (Dominic Sandbrook)
An intelligent thriller . . . with exacting attention to historical detail
A gripping account of the negotiations between Britain and Germany in 1938 before the outbreak of war
Atmospheric and fast-paced literary thriller . . . [it] grips from start to finish . . . Superb
Unputdownable to the point of being dangerous: the house could have been on fire while I was reading and I wouldn’t have noticed
Harris makes the reader gasp at every turn, with a truly moving portrayal of Chamberlain as a man who did the wrong thing for the right reason
A brilliantly constructed spy novel set amid the politicking of Chamberlain’s last-ditch negotiations with Hitler
A tantalising addition to the inexhaustible game of “what if”?
A wonderful tale of personal relationships and political drama…This is a very, very good read
All stars
Most relevant
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.

A Piece For Our Time?

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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.

Gripping account of a pivotal moment in history

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Another masterpiece from Robert Harris exquisitely researched with completely plausible characters including, of course, the real persons. Brilliantly read by David Rintoul.

5 stars for story and narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Into the origins is WW2. I find Robert Harris had to get into initially but always well worth preservering

A fascinating insight...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Robert Harris writes believable historical fiction (or political fiction, alternative history). His prose style is smooth and articulate. Comparison with the historical fiction of Ken Follett (Column of Fire) issued a few days before underlines Harris’s infinite superiority and Rintoul’s skill as a narrator!
Most of the personages in the book are real people- the ones we see in old Pathé newsreels, saw on TV news as children, and the main (fictional) protagonists, once friends at university, estranged for six years as Hitler rises to power, after a difficult holiday in Munich. Fate, with some help, brings them back to Munich, as Chamberlain desperately tries to avert war.
With the release of secret government documents as time allows, has resulted in historians reassessing Chamberlain’s actions in 1938 more positively, and Harris has followed this line, and added some speculative tension to the real horror of 1938 - the building of primitive fortifications in central London, issuing of gas masks to adults and children (babies too), the exodus from London of anyone fortunate enough to have somewhere to go!
Rintoul as usual reads the story with clear diction, well paced, and tackles dialogue in German, French and Italian (always translated to English, so don’t panic if you’re not a polyglot) with convincing pronunciation and fluency.
Literate, but never pompous or condescending, as we expect of Harris. Look forward to his next book!

Another great Harris/Rintoul Audiobook

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews