The Separation
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
"THE SEPARATION is filled with a sense of the precariousness of history; of small events and choices with extraordinary consequences" - David Langford
"Priest is masterful ... I'm rather flabbergasted" - Goodreads Reviewer
This is a not-so-straightforward story of twin brothers, rowers in the 1936 Olympics. One joins the RAF, and captains a Wellington; he is shot down after a bombing raid on Hamburg and becomes Churchill's aide-de-camp. His twin brother, a pacifist, works with the Red Cross, rescuing bombing victims in London. But the two brothers - both called J.L. Sawyer - live their lives in alternate versions of reality. In one, the Second World War ends as we imagine it did; in the other, thanks to efforts of an eminent team of negotiators headed by Hess (Hitler's deputy), the war ends in 1941.
THE SEPARATION is an account of how one perceives and shapes the past, and is an emotionally riveting story of how an average man can make a difference.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this subtle, unsettling alternative WWII history from British author Priest (The Prestige), Jack Sawyer is an RAF bomber pilot who encourages his government to distrust the peace proposal offered by renegade Nazi Rudolph Hess. At the same time, perhaps, Jack's identical twin brother, Joe, is a pacifist Red Cross staffer aiding peace negotiations with a German delegation headed by Hess. Jack's actions help shape the events we remember; Joe's lead to a truce between Germany and Britain in 1941 that results in a disturbingly familiar postwar world. Convincingly detailed diaries, scraps of published texts, declassified transcripts and more baffle a historian who tries to reconcile different realities. The brothers themselves recognize the uncertainty of motives and actions; Joe in particular struggles to believe that he's making a better future even though he realizes how much it costs him personally. Many alternative history novels are bloodless extrapolations from mountains of data, but this one quietly builds characters you care about then leaves their dilemmas unresolved as they try to believe that what they have done is "right."
