The Lady in the Back Seat 
Thomas Jones
Robert Harris’s first novel, Fatherland (1992), was a counterfactual historical thriller set in Nazi Germany in 1964. In the alternative reality of the book, Germany defeated the Soviet Union in the Caucasus in 1943, lured the Royal Navy to its destruction after learning that the British had cracked the Enigma code, and intimidated the United States into signing a peace treaty by successfully testing an atom bomb and launching an intercontinental V3 rocket across the Atlantic. Now Hitler’s 75th birthday is approaching, and a historic summit is planned between the Führer and President Joseph Kennedy, as nearly twenty years of Cold War between the world’s two superpowers look set to thaw.
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Thomas Jones is one of the London Review’s contributing editors.
Other articles by this contributor:
This Is Not That Place · David Eggers escapes from Sudan
Diary · The Last Days of eBay
Welly-Whanging · Alan Hollinghurst
Diary · My Life as a Geek
Rut after Rut after Rut · Denis Johnson’s Vietnam
Intimate Strangers · Thomas Jones reads A.L. Kennedy’s new novel
swete lavender · Molesworth
Whisky and Soda Man · J.G. Ballard
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