First trade paperback printing

 

Condition: Very good plus, light edge and corner wear, faint crease at spine, light nicks at spine ends, price sticker on rear cover, small crease at bottom rear corner.

 

Publishing Info: Gollancz, London, 2007

ISBN: 9780575081154

 

In 1999, history author Stuart Gratton is intrigued by a minor mystery of the European war which ended on 10 May 1941. The British-German armistice signed that month has had far-reaching consequences, including a resettlement of European Jews in Madagascar.

 

In 1936, the identical twin brothers Joe and Jack Sawyer win a rowing medal for Britain in the Berlin Olympics: it's presented to them by Rudolf Hess. The brothers are separated not only by a twin's fierce need "to be treated as a separate human being", but by sexual rivalry and even ideology. When war breaks out Jack becomes a gung-ho bomber pilot, Joe a conscientious objector. Still they're inescapably linked, and sometimes confused. Both suffer injuries and hauntingly similar ambulance journeys. Churchill writes a puzzled memo (later unearthed by Gratton) about the anomaly of a registered-pacifist Red Cross worker flying planes for Bomber Command. Hess has significant, eventually incompatible meetings with both men. Contradictions are everywhere.

 

Author of The Prestige, filmed by Christopher Nolan, and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the World Fantasy Award.

 

Christopher Priest official site

 

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