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In this extraordinary World War II alternate history, master storyteller Harry Turtledove begins with a big switch: what if Neville Chamberlain, instead of appeasing Hitler, had stood up to him in 1938? Enraged, Hitler reacts by lashing out at the West, promising his soldiers that they will reach Paris by the new year. They don't. Three years later, his genocidal apparatus not fully in place, Hitler has barely survived a coup, while Jews cling to survival. But England and France wonder whether the war is still worthwhile.
Weaving together a cast of characters that ranges from a brawling American fighter in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain to a woman who has seen Hitler's evil face-to-face, Harry Turtledove takes us into a world shaping up very differently in 1941. The Germans and their Polish allies have slammed into the gut of the Soviet Union in the west, while Japan pummels away in the east. In trench warfare in France, French and Czech fighters are out-manned but not outfought by their Nazi enemy. Then the stalemate is shattered. In England, Winston Churchill dies in an apparent accident, and the gray men who walk behind his funeral cortege wonder who their real enemy is. The USSR, fighting for its life, makes peace with Japan - and Japan's war with America is about to begin.
A sweeping saga of human passions, foolishness, and courage, of families and lovers and soldiers by choice and by chance, The Big Switch is a provocative, gripping, and utterly convincing work of alternate history at its best. For history buffs and fans of big, blood-and-guts fiction, Harry Turtledove delivers a panoramic clash of ideals as powerful as armies themselves.
"Turtledove slowly reaches the midpoint of the five-book War that Came Early series... There are obvious similarities to our own world's time line, but at last the alternate history has begun to diverge." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. ...[T]his latest Turtledove saga is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. It is for lovers of high-quality alternate history." - Booklist
This information about The War That Came Early 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.
Harry Norman Turtledove was born in Los Angeles, CA on 14 June 1949. After
failing out of his freshman year at Caltech, he attended UCLA, where he received
a Ph.D. in Byzantine history in 1977. His dissertation was on The Immediate
Successors of Justinian: A Study of the Persian Problem and of Continuity and
Change in Internal Secular Affairs in the Later Roman Empire During the Reigns
of Justin II and Tiberius II Constantine (A.D. 565-582).
In 1979, Turtledove published his first two novels, Wereblood and
Werenight, under the pseudonym "Eric G. Iverson". Turtledove later explained
that his editor at Belmont Towers did not think people would believe the
author's real name was "Turtledove" and suggested that he come up with something
more Nordic. He ...
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