V2 Paperback by Robert Harris

Product Details

• Publisher: Random House Canada (2020-11-17)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 320 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780735275171
• Item Weight: 481.95 grams
• Dimensions: 9.15 x 6.3 x 0.93 cm

A gripping thriller from the bestselling author of Munich and Fatherland.

"The first rocket will hit London in five minutes. You have six minutes to stop the second."

Rudi Graf has dreamt since childhood of sending a rocket to the moon. Instead, along with his friend Werner von Braun, he has helped create the world's most sophisticated weapon—the V2 ballistic missile, capable of delivering a one-ton warhead at three times the speed of sound.

In a desperate gamble to avoid defeat, Hitler orders 10,000 to be built.

Now, in the winter of 1944, Graf finds himself in a bleak seaside town in Occupied Holland. Haunted and disillusioned, he's tasked with firing the V2s at London. Nobody understands the volatile, deadly machine better than he does.

Kay Caton-Walsh is an officer in the WAAF. She has experienced first-hand the horror of a V2 strike. As the rockets rain down, she joins a unit of WAAFs on a mission to newly-liberated Belgium. Armed with little more than a slide rule and a few equations, the hope is that Kay and her colleagues can locate and destroy the launch sites.

But at this stage in the war it's hard to know who, if anyone, you can trust.

For every action on one side, there is an equal and opposite reaction on the other. As the death toll soars, the separate stories of Graf and Kay ricochet off one another, until in a final explosion of violence their destinies are forced together.

About the Author

ROBERT HARRIS is the author of fourteen bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy—Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator—Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich, The Second Sleep and V2. Several of his books have been adapted into films, including The Ghost. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives in West Berkshire with his wife, Gill Hornby.