HHhH: A Novel

Synopsis

“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

A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"Unsurpassable... Told with elegance and grace... A magnificent book."—Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

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 Gabčík 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.