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Published Jul 2013
336 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most lethal man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich seemed indestructible--until two exiled operatives, a Slovak and a Czech, killed him and changed the course of history.
In Laurent Binet's mesmerizing debut, we follow Jozef Gabcík and Jan Kubiš from their dramatic escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to their fatal attack on Heydrich and their own brutal deaths in the basement of a Prague church. A seamless blend of memory, actuality, and Binet's own remarkable imagination, HHhH is at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing--a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the debt we owe to history.
"Brings a raw truth to an extraordinary act of resistance...A literary tour de force...A gripping novel that brings us closer to history as it really happened." - Alan Riding, The New York Times Book Review
"Binet has threaded his novel with a contemporary story, which is the drama of the book's own making.... The tone is clever, witty, casually postmodern....Captivating." - James Wood, The New Yorker
"HHhH is a startling novel....Who would expect a postmodern exploration of the limits of historical fiction to be a page-turner? But it is, absolutely....Fascinating." - Madeline Miller, NPR
"Marvelous...Pulsing with life, lit by a wisp of dry humor, [and] fully imagined." - Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
"[An] extraordinary first novel...HHhH, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, charts Heydrich's rise through the Nazi ranks and Germany's march to war...[to] the training in Britain of the Czech and Slovak assassins, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabcík, who parachuted into the country in December 1941 to kill Heydrich. Ample material for a decent espionage thriller, but Binet, 'a slave to my scruples,' makes something altogether less commonplace of it. His fidelity to the historical record, and obsessive urge to analyse those moments where surmise replaces fact, makes HHhH as much about the technical and moral processes of writing a historical novel as it is a historical novel...This unusual method results in a literary triumph...Using short, punchy chapters, Binet keeps his story haring along. The book's final section, which recounts the assassination and subsequent manhunt in minute detail, is a masterpiece of tension, and its closing pages are extremely moving. Very few page-turners come as smart and original as this." - Chris Power, The Times (London)
"[Binet] knows how to wrangle powerful moments from history." - Susannah Meadows, The New York Times
"Every now and then a piece of work comes along that undermines the assumptions upon which all previous works have been built...These pieces of art complicate the genre for everyone that follows. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius did it for the memoir, Reservoir Dogs for action films, and now HHhH does it for the historical novel. Laurent Binet's brilliantly translated debut deconstructs the process of fiction writing in the face of the brute reality of facts...Binet's [HHhH] resets the path of the historical novel. He has a bright, bright future." - David Annand, The Telegraph
"HHhH blew me away... It's one of the best historical novels I've ever come across." - Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero
"Unsurpassable... Told with elegance and grace... A magnificent book." - Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
This information about HHhH was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. He is the author of La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B., a memoir of his experience teaching in secondary schools in Paris. In March 2010, his debut novel, HHhH, won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. Laurent Binet is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature.
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