We mentioned the American president already. We recommend it but with some reservations. His son is literally a little Nazi, not surprisingly given the environment, and that estranges Xavier and his son even more.įatherland is a good book but not a great book. Xavier is divorced and sees his only child, a son, on some weekends. Robert has an interesting method to show the horrors of living in a totalitarian environment. The mystery has interesting twists even though we know more than the characters. Xavier and Charlie are an interesting couple. We enjoyed Robert’s view of Berlin after a WWII German victory. The Nazis winning WWII is a great premise. The story is about a never-Nazi German cop, Xavier March, and American reporter, Charlotte (Charlie) Maguire, trying to solve a mystery involving suspicious deaths and missing art works that the Nazis don’t want solved. We thought, since it was a counterfactual, that Joe junior didn’t die during WWI and he, rather than Jack, became president as his dad had hoped.

One of the shortcomings of the book is failing to identify the president as Joe senior. Hitler is still Chancellor and it is 1964, shortly before his 75th birthday and meeting with American president Joseph Kennedy senior. Munich is the better book but Fatherland is worth the read and really quite good for a debut.įatherland comes with a really interesting counterfactual premise, Germany won WWII and the Cold War is between Germany and the USA. It took a long time to get that fixed so we went to the library but that took time as well. Reading Fatherland was a challenge because the electronic first version we ordered from Apple came in Italian.

Urn:oclc:47651681 Scandate 20100320002110 Scanner really enjoyed Munich by Robert Harris so we decided to start with Robert’s first book, Fatherland, to see if we wanted to binge-read Robert. OL894071W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 92.82 Pages 408 Ppi 500 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0679741585 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 18:27:55 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA114617 Camera Canon 5D City London Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary Edition.

Fatherland by Robert Harris