Description

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf and The House by the Lake comes a gripping true story of murder, war and injustice in Nazi-occupied Florence

‘I absolutely devoured The Einstein Vendetta’ EDMUND DE WAAL

‘Thomas Harding is a researcher of the first rank’ DAILY EXPRESS

‘Harding evokes time and place beautifully, while paying forensic attention to detail. The result is a slow burn of cliff-hangers to keep the pages turning’ SPECTATOR

‘The Einstein Vendetta will tug at your heartstrings and prompt righteous outrage’ TELEGRAPH

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TUSCANY, 1944. German soldiers arrive at a villa on the outskirts of Florence to interrogate the cousin of the world’s most famous scientist. Hours later, innocent civilians are dead and the troops have vanished.

Weaving together first-hand testimony, unpublished material and original interviews, Thomas Harding tells a dramatic story of vengeance – and of one family’s personal torment – as Nazi forces made a last brutal stand ahead of impending Allied liberation.

Publisher Review

Praise for The Einstein Vendetta * – * What’s in a name? Well, if it’s Einstein, quite a lot. Thomas Harding has carved out a significant reputation as a prize-winning writer, and The Einstein Vendetta makes for deeply shocking reading. This is a gripping, finely researched, superbly written and deeply important book — Anna Sebba * Spectator * I absolutely devoured The Einstein Vendetta. It is so moving and the way in which Harding navigates the unresolved nature of the story is quite remarkable. Totally compelling * Edmund de Waal * An absolute triumph. Beautifully judged and infused with humanity and empathy — Allan Little Nazi brutality, and the resulting family pain and grief, is vividly recorded. The Einstein Vendetta shines a light on these forgotten lives and crimes and on the limits of post-war attempts to secure justice. Harding evokes time and place beautifully, while paying forensic attention to detail. The result is a slow burn of cliff-hangers to keep the pages turning * Spectator * Scrupulously researched * Herald * The Einstein Vendetta will tug at your heartstrings and prompt righteous outrage. Harding captures beautifully the general atmosphere of wartime Tuscany, the fear the family must have felt in their last hours and the inhuman toll the executions took. Harding is excellent on the investigations of the case – the details of this ‘slow, hard work. Real shoe-leather work’ could in other hands be dry and dusty, but Harding makes them riveting: archival files poured over in search of vital clues, witnesses undone by failing memory, and always the hope that some small cosmic order will be restored by finding the man who ordered the shootings * Telegraph * Thomas Harding has carved out a niche unravelling unexplained events. The Einstein Vendetta shows that, although more than eighty years have passed since the Wehrmacht and the SS retreated from Tuscany, there is still substantial appetite to nail down the crimes they committed * Caroline Moorhead, Literary Review * Did the Fuhrer personally order the hit? Doggedly pursuing his own investigation, Mr Harding interviews surviving witnesses and Einstein family members * Economist * A riveting quest for the truth. Harding shines a spotlight on a range of investigators and their dogged detective work . . . Best of all is the book’s final section, which exerts a thriller-like grip. Harding’s treatment of the investigations comprises open and closed cases, possible suspects and unreliable witnesses, fact-finding trips far and wide, and a momentous discovery * Washington Examiner *