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A Novel
by David Peace
From the acclaimed author of The Damned Utd, a novel of tragedy and renewal, inspired by one of the greatest disasters in the history of sports.
In 1958, Manchester United was flying high: the best-known soccer team in the world and reigning English champions, the team was led by a bright young group of star players nicknamed the "Busby Babes" after their charismatic manager Matt Busby. But on a snowy afternoon that February, a plane carrying the team back from a European Cup match crashed on takeoff in Munich, killing 23 people―including eight Manchester United players and three team officials. The accident destroyed the team, traumatized fans all over the world, and devastated the tight-knit community in Manchester.
In this hypnotic and deeply moving novel, renowned novelist David Peace reimagines the crash and its aftermath, dramatizing the deep scars it left on British society. Moving between the fictionalized voices of survivors, including players, their family members, and Busby himself, Munichs powerfully interprets the struggles of a team, a city, and a nation to recover and rise again.
Peace has been hailed as "brilliant" by Kazuo Ishiguro and his novels have been lauded as "incantatory" (Los Angeles Times), "ambitious and heartbreaking" (NPR), and "the stuff of great literature" (New York Times Book Review). With Munichs, he has crafted another extraordinary novel, one that intimately explores the reverberations of trauma and the power of community in the wake of tragedy.
"[A] deeply moving account … Peace captures all the conflicting emotions of people trying to rally in the wake of a senseless tragedy. Readers should pounce." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Peace is aiming for melancholy, but too often the story is just drowsy. A baggy tribute to a devastating moment." —Kirkus Reviews
"Electrifying … Here, again, is the need to understand what has preoccupied those closest to us." ―Guardian (UK)
"Haunting but full of love … Touching on profound themes such as greatness, loss, grief, friendship, resilience and the meaning of sport, Munichs does that, and more. A magnificent book." ―The Times (UK)
"[A book] of enormous tenderness too―because this is a thorough and reverent tribute to everybody involved … The combination of heart, sheer scale and―let's face it―a sense of relief that Peace has forsaken cussedness for epic narrative sweep adds up to an irresistibly stirring read." ―Sunday Times (UK)
"Peace is that rare thing in literary publishing: a genuine crossover success, bringing the pleasures of well-crafted narrative fiction to readers of true crime, social history and sports biography … There is artistry here too, in the author's sensitive weighting of tone and timbre, and the elegant simplicity of the dialogue … an elegy for a society's lost innocence." ―Financial Times (UK)
"A work of exhaustive research, numinous scope, and scalding intimacy; a remorselessly beautiful, grieving, loving testament to a tragedy; and David Peace's greatest book yet." ―Tom Benn, author of Oxblood
"Luminous and illuminating, a completely gripping novel about despair and repair told with heart and guts and grace." ―Ashley Hickson-Lovence, author of The 392
"Munichs is one of the most powerful treatments of shock mediated by ordinary human decency I have read." ―Tariq Goddard, author of Homage to a Firing Squad
This information about Munichs was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Peace is the author of eleven novels, including the Red Riding Quartet; GB84, which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; the Tokyo Trilogy; Red or Dead; and The Damned Utd, which was made into a feature film starring Michael Sheen. He has been chosen as one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists. Born and raised in Yorkshire, England, he now lives in Tokyo.
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