The Ghost of Munich - Hardcover

Daladier is the unlikely protagonist of this compelling novel...he is a sympathetic if utterly ineffectual character, strangely human as he blusters at Chamberlain...this novel succeeds in making history unfamiliar as it thinks about abandoned contexts of historical events - Literary Review

The Ghost of Munich is proof that he can cannily combine the high concept novel with a talent for historical fiction...the choice of him (Daladier) as protagonist is a masterstroke. The notion of putting one of history's nowhere men at the centre of one of the 20th century great tragedies pays dividends...deft translation...scarifying portraits of Hitler and Mussolini - Independent.

September 29th 1938. The day the fate of Czechoslovakia was sealed by the Munich Agreement. Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain and - the phantom of Munich, Edouard Daladier, president of the French Council. Summer 1968. A mysterious American journalist, young, female, Czech in origin - lands on a small island in the Rhone river. Her mission is to find Edouard Daladier, who is widely believed to be dead and to persuade him, as the only living witness to the events of Munich to let her have access to his extraordinary archive and to tell her his secrets. Daladier is a recluse, obsessed with history and his part in it but the journalist succeeds in drawing from him the astonishing story of the betrayal of a nation. Scene by scene, hour by hour the reader accompanies Daladier from his departure to Munich to his triumphant, but ultimately tragic return to Paris. In Munich we sit with him and the other leaders at the negotiation table, at lunch, in and out of each other's seats, hotel rooms and cars. The tensions of the fateful day build up, the political twists and turns and the personal intensities are described with insight and humour. The Ghost of Munich has the sharpness of a film, the drama of tragedy and the truth of history.