Dominion Synopsis
At once a vivid, haunting reimagining of 1950s Britain, a gripping, humane spy thriller and a poignant love story, with Dominion C.J. Sansom once again asserts himself as the master of the historical novel. 1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany. The press, radio and television are tightly controlled. British Jews face ever greater constraints. But Churchill's Resistance soldiers on. And in a Birmingham mental hospital, fragile scientist Frank Muncaster holds a secret that could alter the balance of the global struggle forever.Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, a spy for the Resistance, is given the mission to rescue Frank and get him out of the country. Hard on his heels is Gestapo agent Gunther Hoth, a brilliant, implacable hunter of men, who soon has Frank, along with David's innocent wife, Sarah, directly in his sights.C.J. Sansom's literary thriller Winter in Madrid earned him comparisons to Graham Greene, Sebastian Faulks and Ernest Hemingway. Now, in the first alternative history epic from Sansom in the tradition of Robert Harris's Fatherland and Stephen King's 11/22/63, Sansom doesn't just recreate the past--he reinvents it. In a spellbinding tale of suspense, oppression and poignant love, Dominion dares to explore how, in moments of crisis, history can turn on the decisions of a few brave men and women--the secrets they keep and the bonds they share.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780345813657 |
| Publication date: |
13th August 2013 |
| Author: |
C. J. Sansom |
| Publisher: |
Random House of Canada |
| Format: |
Ebook |
| Primary Genre |
Historical Fiction
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| Recommendations: |
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C. J. Sansom Press Reviews
'C. J. Sansom takes a break from his Shardlake series to offer Dominion, an absorbing, thoughtful, spy-politico thriller set in the fog-ridden London of 1952. Not, however, the year as it is usually remembered. Sansom has attempted a difficult format -- the what if? novel. What if, in 1940, Lord Halifax became prime minister instead of Churchill? Britain would have made peace with Hitler, Sansom answers, and by 1952 become a totalitarian state, with Germany, acting as puppet-master rather than invader, setting the scene. Churchill, in hiding, is leader of a resistance movement, to which the hero of Dominion, David Fitzgerald, a civil servant hiding his Jewishness, belongs. Part adventure, part espionage, all encompassed by terrific atmosphere and a well-argued it might have been '
Marcel Berlins, The Times
'An intriguing thriller set in an alternative Britain under the Nazis cunningly reanimates the post-war years as they might have been ... What if the second world war had ended not in 1945, but in 1940? In this haunting, vividly imagined novel by C. J. Sansom, the hinge on which history turns is the resignation of Neville Chamberlain in May 1940... As in the Shardlake novels, set in Tudor England, for which he is best known, Sansom is an admirably expansive and unhurried storyteller. His characters are all given personal histories and richly detailed pasts that serve to provide them with a depth more usually associated with literary fiction than the thriller. Their conversations do more than just drive forward the plot: they help to give substance and reality to the world they inhabit. The alternative Britain that Sansom constructs, a brilliant amalgam of the 1950s as they actually were and as they might have been, is entirely convincing. Throwaway details cleverly add verisimilitude to his portrait. The tale he sets within his parallel universe is at once exciting, sophisticated and moving. There will be few better historical novels published this year'
Sunday Times
'This is a big novel with traces of a thriller, in which the good are good and the bad are very bad indeed ... For readers who enjoy a grown-up adventure story Dominion is evocative, alarming and richly satisfying'
Daily Express
'Masterly ... sketched with hallucinatory clarity ... Sansom, whose Tudor mysteries showed his feeling for the plight of good people in a brutal, treacherous society, builds his nightmare Britain from the sooty bricks of truth ... From the thuggish Auxies who beat up protestors to the apolitical rebellion of the Jive Boys , every note in Sansom's smoggy hell rings true ...No bulldog defiance in 1940; no weary triumph in 1945; no dogged renewal with the post-war Welfare State: Dominion shows us what a truly broken Britain would look, and feel, like'
Boyd Tonkin, Independent
'A thriller which is also, and perhaps primarily, a work of alternative or counter-factual history, set in 1952 ... in the manner of Robert Harris's Fatherland. There are fine things a-plenty here, and the plot unfolds compellingly and gallops along briskly. C. J. Sansom has brought off a nice double, writing a good thriller which invites you to ponder the different course history might have taken'
Allan Massie, Scotsman
'C. J. Sansom is fascinated by the abuse of power, so it's not surprising that, hot on the heels of his splendid Shardlake series, comes a novel set in a post-war Britain dominated by Nazi ideology ... There have been a number of other novels imagining this kind of alternate history -- Robert Harris's Fatherland, Owen Sheers'
Resistance, Len Deighton
's SS-GB and, for children, Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon. All are outstanding in different ways but Sansom's Dominion is the most thoroughly imagined in all its ramifications. Like Harris, Sansom has woven a thriller with the tale of a man's growth into moral courage, but he has done it with the compassion and richness that many literary writers should emulate. Every detail of this nightmare Britain rings true ... As in Sansom's Winter in Madrid, the clash between compassion and political conviction is dramatised. David's looks and talent make him as freakish in his way as frail, disabled Frank, and the friendship between someone who can survive institutions and someone who cannot is one of the most affecting aspects of the novel ... Naturally, the weather is awful, and obliges with a choking, oily fog as our heroes battle against hideous odds to get to safety. But both as a historical novel and a thriller, Dominion is absorbing, mordant and written with a passionate persuasiveness ... Bravo!'
Independent on Sunday
'One of the thrills of Dominion is to see a writer whose previous talent has been for the captivating dramatisation of real history (in his five books about the Tudor sleuth, Matthew Shardlake, and the Spanish civil war novel Winter in Madrid) creating an invented mid-20th century Britain that has the intricate detail and delineation of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth ...A tremendous novel that shakes historical preconceptions while also sending shivers down the spine'
Mark Lawson, Guardian
'The chase is exciting and the action thrilling, but the really absorbing part of this excellent book is the detailed creation of a society that could so easily have existed'
Literary Review
'Fans of Robert Harris will love this'
Mail on Sunday