Munich Robert Harris Hutchinson €14.99

Set over four critical days in September 1938, when Neville Chamberlain travelled to Munich in a last-ditch effort to appease Hitler and prevent Germany from invading Czechoslovakia, Harris’s latest offering is another well-researched, atmospheric and fast-paced literary thriller, which grips from start to finish. Mixing real events and historical figures with a fictional subplot involving two junior civil servants from each side, who were at Oxford together and who attempt to change the course of history, Munich captures the mood of the times: the suspicion and the fear, the political intrigue, the swagger of the Nazi machine, and the widespread elation at the mistaken belief that war has been averted. Superb.