Author: Freedland, Jonathan

20th century

Published on 11 September 2025 by John Murray Press (John Murray Publishers Ltd) in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 480 pages, 20 black & white photographs
241 x 164 x 43 | 752g

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERFROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ESCAPE ARTIST’Magnificent . . . Important and impressive’ DAILY TELEGRAPH’Astonishing . . . Freedland is a master’MICK HERRON’Remarkable . . . This is how the best history books will be written in the future’ANDREW ROBERTS’Excellent . . . Perfect reading for this moment’ANNE APPLEBAUM’Utterly gripping, brilliantly researched and written’ANTHONY HOROWITZ’Compelling’MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES’Thrilling, humane, and deeply moving . . . Not to be missed’DAVID McCLOSKEY’Totally gripping and timely’JONATHAN DIMBLEBYWhen the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.

Berlin, 1943. A group of high-society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo – revealing their secret to the Nazis’ most ruthless detective.

They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador’s widow and a pioneering headmistress. Meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Fhrer’s rule, what unites them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance. Or so they believe.

How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap? And who betrayed them?Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich’s cruellest men, they showed a heroism that raises a question with new urgency for our time: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?