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´One of Britain´s most visionary writers´ David Peace

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The new novel from the author of the highly acclaimed The Butchers of Berlin, soon to be a TV series
Berlin, July 1944 , a world of illicit jazz clubs, sexually generous young women, suspect art dealers, last-ditch zealots and a city defined by crumbling infrastructure, advanced terror, dirty secrets and deep politics - and then there is August Schlegel, caught askance in a web of totalitarian mayhem.

Everybody knows what happened on 20 July: Führer Adolf Hitler miraculously survived an assassination attempt when a bomb failed to kill him. Schlegel, a reluctant employee of the Gestapo, finds himself in the foolhardy position of questioning the official version, knowing it is the last thing he should be thinking. Was it a propaganda stunt, or a deception or was something more extreme going on, perhaps a cover-up connected to the mysterious burning down of a Berlin clinic? A deadly political dance takes Schlegel all the way up to Party Secretary Martin Bormann, the Chancellory´s sinister ´black pope´.

Information is controlled, informers are everywhere, secrecy remains the cornerstone of the regime, yet someone appears interested in digging up a carefully buried scandal in the Führer´s past private life, an incestuous affair with his young niece that ended mysteriously in 1931. Rumours circulate of a ´Hitler confession´.

Trapped in a kingdom of lies, Schlegel discovers the blighted present and a censored past are connected in ways he could never have imagined. The niece´s tragic end is intimately bound up with the fate of his long-lost father, whom Schlegel had always believed absconded to Argentina and died there, until he finds a private 1925 edition of Mein Kampf , dedicated to ´Anton Schlegel´, signed, ´In eternal gratitude, Adolf Hitler.´

The identity of Schlegel´s father - and whether he is still alive and operating as a secret puppet master - becomes inseparable from the enigma of a shapeshifting Führer, going back to the early days when he was known to Anton Schlegel as Herr Wolf.

Questioning the official version of events, Chris Petit offers a dazzling reinterpretation of history, showing how the deeper secret truths invariably turn out to be personal.
Praise for Chris Petit:

´No denying the book´s power´ Nick Rennison, Sunday Times

´The real skill of this rigorous, disturbing novel lies in the way Petit steadily and unsensationally allows his protagonists to discover the full horror of the hellhole they are in´ Guardian

´One of Britain´s most visionary writers´ David Peace

´Powerful evocation of a city living in terror´ Sunday Times Crime Club

´Ambitious, darkly atmospheric´ The Times

´Hugely impressive and highly readable; in the tradition of Thomas Harris´s The Silence of the Lambs´ Financial Times

´Ferocious invention marks this novel out as special´ The Edge

´Ambitious and intelligent´ Times

´Puts Petit in the first rank´ Metro

´A zigzagging narrative as byzantine an blackly pessemistic as late James Ellroy´ Independent on Sunday

´An example of the genre near its best. Gorky Park with something to spare; well worth anyone´s weekend´ Guardian for The Psalm Killer

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