I did read a lot of Reviews of this book, these have enriched me immensely, I have read brilliant arguments about Britain during the ‘what if’ scenario and comparisons to Britain now,in the present age. Shardlake works on commission initially from Thomas Cromwell in Dissolution and Dark Fire and then Thomas Cranmer in Sovereign and Revelation.

Powell, who only entered Parliament in 1950, was an admirer of British rule in India, that much is true, but by the early 1950s his imperial convictions were weakening.Also after all the attention during the novel to Frank not wanting to tell anyone - the scene where he tells David the secret are completely implausible. In a novel which imagines a Nazi-dominated Britain in 1952, it is quite clear that Sansom is positing that Scotland's future might be dark and twisted. And in a Birmingham mental hospital, an incarcerated scientist, Frank Muncaster, may hold a secret that could change the balance of the world struggle forever.

The tension built in waves but they all came crashing down in a denouement that undermined the whole premise of the plot. Variations on Hitler's defeat by the allies have become a recurrent strain in the genre of counter-factual or alternative-history fiction.If so, I imagine it was rejected many times over for the perceived faults that I'll go into here and other reviewers have commented on. But I can see that plenty of other readers really appreciated it, so I think this one comes down to personal taste. What is to follow is a very thrilling kind of historical adventure, and that is brought to us by the author in a very entertaining fashion. The hard decisions we know he took in the war do not lead me me to believe he would be the kind of resistance leader who would spare the sensitivies of one man, compared to the potential benefit to the resistance. J. Sansom, though I’m told that he is well-respected for his Shardlake series, historical novels set in Tudor England.

Sansom offers us an alternative Britain in Dominion, a Britain occupied by Nazi Germany where Britain has become Hitler’s greatest ally. I love David as a character, and I'm sad that the relationship with his wife before the death of their son, Charlie, wasn't explored more deeply. In the contretemps that follows, the said brother is pushed out of the window of Muncaster’s flat, while he proceeds to wreck the place (why? The far right in Europe is active in the 2020s which makes this novel as relevant now as when it was written. I thought the whole alternate history concept was excellent, and I was drawn into the whole world very well.It centres on one Frank Muncaster, a geologist, who has learned a ‘dreadful secret’ that turns out to be no secret at all. In Britain, Winston Churchill's Resistance organization is increasingly a thorn in the government's side.

The Historical Note, incidentally, which starts off objectively enough, ends up as a carpet-chewing rant against nationalism in general and – would you believe it? Rytuose tebesitęsia ilgas Vokietijos karas su Rusija, o britai atsiduria tamsioje autoritarinėje valdžioje: spauda, radijas ir televizija kontroliuojami, gatvėse patruliuoja smurtaujanti pagalbinė policija, o Britanijos žydai susiduria su vis didesniais suvaržymais.A teaser of life in an alternate 1952 shows us the rise of Moseley to Home secretary, the Germans jostling for power as Hitler ails, Prime Minister Quisling of Norway, Fanny Craddock teaching viewers to make Sauerkraut. Valstybės tarnautojas Davidas Fitzgeraldas, slapta veikiantis kaip Pasipriešinimo organizacijos šnipas, gauna užduotį išgelbėti savo seną mokslų universitete laikų draugą Franką ir išvežti jį iš šalies. It is 1952 and in the UK the people are ruled by a puppet government that submitted to the Nazi government in 1940 after the disaster of Dunkirk. David's wife Sarah, haunted by a powerfully evoked bereavement, is happy to keep her head down and ignore political realities until, in a brilliantly written set-piece on a smoggy Tottenham Court Road, an aspect of Auschwitz comes to London.