Nightmare in Nanking: A Novel (Unabridged‪)‬

A Nazi businessman and a Christian missionary form an unlikely alliance when an invading army turns their lives in China into a life-or-death struggle....


Author Tony Garel-Frantzen delivers again, this time with his debut historical fiction novel, Nightmare in Nanking—a vivid and sprawling adventure based on the unforgettable true story of America’s Minnie Vautrin and Germany’s John Rabe, two strangers whose paths cross unexpectedly when they come face-to-face with unimaginable atrocities in Nanking on the eve of World War II in the Pacific.



Nightmare in Nanking is a fresh milestone account of Vautrin’s life, beginning with her birth in the late 19th century in a tiny prairie town on the Illinois frontier. Listeners will revel in the stirringly authentic recounting of Vautrin’s struggle to break free of Victorian conventions that shackled women of her era, and the quirks of fate that caused her life to intertwine with a bookish-looking Nazi—John Rabe of Hamburg.


Armed only with courage and intractable moral willpower, Vautrin and Rabe are thrust over and over again into cliffhanger confrontations against barbaric soldiers intent on killing Chinese men and heinously hunting Chinese women and girls to rape, torture, and murder their prey.


Set against the exotic vista of late 1930's China, Nightmare in Nanking is a triumph of imaginative storytelling sculpted from two years of extensive research. Listeners will be deeply affected by this timeless tale of how personal bravery brandished in the face of evil saved tens of thousands of Chinese non-combatants—but left two very different souls who grew up a world apart indelibly branded and irreversibly doomed in the process.