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Alternate History
Here are some of my favourite alternative history novels.
Eventually we will have detailed reviews of them all.
Fox on the Rhine
A what if book,shows if actual histirical
July 1944 plot by German officers to kill Hitler actually suceeded.
After Hitlers death Henrich Himmler
seizes power and makes a seperate peace with Stalin.With General
Rommel back in command of German troops in the west.Then Germany
mass produces jet fighters devestating Allied airforces.
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it from amazon.co.uk |
Stars & Stripes Forever
First in a trilogy which tells the story of a
mid-19th century war that never happened. Prince Albert dies of
typhoid before he can rewrite an intemperately-worded dispatch by
Britain's Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, to Abraham Lincoln.
Emotions in Washington and London escalate.
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it from amazon.co.uk |
 Stars & Stripes in Peril
Now it's 1863 and perfidious Albion is making
a comeback via the Pacific, establishing a Mexican beachhead and
planning attacks on united America's "soft underbelly"
in the Gulf of Mexico. Gurkha and Sepoy troops build roads while
sweaty white officers express nostalgia for England: "I despair
of ever seeing her blissfully cold and fog-shrouded shores again."
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it from amazon.co.uk |
Fatherland
In 1992, Hutchinson published a book,
which became a bestseller; entitled Fatherland, by Robert Harris
in which we see a very different 1964.
In this world, that almost existed,
but never was, we see a Berlin that Hitler’s architect, Albert
Speer, planned to build, - the hub of a victorious Third Reich extending
from the Rhine to the Urals.
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it from amazon.co.uk
Read an article
on gaming Fatherland.
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Resurrection Day
In the early 1970s, ten years after the nuclear
war that followed the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US is still struggling
to recover. Journalist Carl Landry finds himself in the middle of
a government cover-up.
Brendan DuBois is an award-winning US author of
mystery stories: this alternate-world thriller is very much in the
tradition of Robert Harris's Fatherland. The striking blurb line:
"Everyone remembered exactly what they were doing the day President
Kennedy tried to kill them". History went awry in this world's
Cuba crisis, leading to a 1962 nuclear war that devastated Russia,
crippled America and left Britain a major world power smugly giving
aid to the USA. Cut to 1972 Boston and ex-soldier Carl Landry, now
a newspaper reporter whose coverage of a routine murder is suppressed
by military censors. He's unwisely curious, investigates further
and inevitably stirs up a hornets' nest. Attacks, deaths and disappearances
follow. With a new-found girlfriend--an English Times reporter who
is not all she seems--Landry uncovers a succession of red-hot secrets
about abandoned New York, perfidious British and military plotting,
and crucial documents coveted by several factions with different
beliefs about their contents. Is Kennedy unjustly despised for starting
World War Three? Is the rumour that he's still alive just this timeline's
version of the Elvis myth? After building up terrific tension, DuBois
delivers satisfying answers. Grimly plausible (apart from a few
lapses in "British" dialogue) and worthy of the Fatherland
comparisons.
This is probably one of my favourite books of all time, I have read it quite a few times now and enjoy it every time.
Order
is now from amazon.co.uk. |
The Shadow of Albion
Young Sarah Cunningham is ripped from the present
day and thrust into a volatile alternative Europe of 1805 where
King Henry IX rules over the English Empire, America has no revolution,
and Napoleon Bonaparte marches unchecked across Europe.
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The Shadow of Albion from amazon.co.uk |
Operation Shatterhand
Alternate (or not so alternate) history: What
might have happened when the Nazis tried to invade the U.S. via
Mexico...and smacked hard against the obstacle of the native Hopi
and Navajo peoples? One thing's for sure: the Germans would never
have known what hit them...
Order
is now from amazon.co.uk. |
1632
In Flint's novel of time travel and
alternate history, a six-mile square of West Virginia is tossed
back in time and space to Germany in 1632, at the height of the
barbaric and devastating Thirty Years' War. Repelling marauding
mercenaries and housing German refugees are only the first of many
problems the citizens of the tiny new U.S. face, problems including
determining who shall be a citizen. In between action scenes and
descriptions of technological military hardware, Flint handles that
problem and other serious ethical questions seriously and offers
a double handful of memorable characters: a Sephardic Jewish family
that establishes commercial and marital ties with the Americans,
a cheerleader captain turned lethal master sniper, a schoolteacher
and an African American doctor who provide indispensable common
sense and skill, a German refugee who is her family's sole protector,
and, not least, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Not, perhaps,
as elegant as some time-traveling alternate histories, Flint's is
an intelligent page-turner nevertheless. Order
it from amazon.co.uk |
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