Munich

It’s 1938, and, with Hitler poised to invade Czechoslovakia, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flies to Munich in a last-ditch attempt to avert war. Will he succeed? We know the answer to that, of course, but Robert Harris’s genius is to be able to take historical events such as this and enmesh them with a vivid fictional narrative so seamlessly that the reader is helplessly hooked from the first to the last page.