HHhH

[An] extraordinary true story... made still better by the way in which Laurent Binet weaves in his own exploits as researcher and detective to uncover the truth

Week

HHhH is a highly original piece of work, at once charming, moving, and gripping

Martin Amis

HHhH blew me away. Binet’s style fuses it all together: a neutral, journalistic honesty sustained with a fiction writer’s zeal and story-telling instincts. It’s one of the best historical novels I’ve ever come across.

Brett Easton Ellis

A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it … In principle there's nothing not to like about Laurent Binet's acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance

James Lasdun, Guardian

A genuine tour de force

L'Humanite

A great success ... a terrifying story ... a breathless thriller

La Provence

A gripping thriller and a moving testament to the heroes of the Czechoslovakian resistance. Their mission resets the path of history. Binet’s resets the path of the historical novel. He has a bright, bright future.

David Annand, Sunday Telegraph

A literary tour de force

Alan Riding, Scotland on Sunday

A master stroke

Le Figaro Magazine

A must-read for people who have a real interest in the Third Reich … improbably entertaining and electrifyingly modern, a moving work

Royston Crow

A nail-biting novel, a thorough work of history and, most successfully of all, an exercise in form: a story about the writing of a true story

Lucy Kellaway, Financial Times

A suspenseful work of absolute originality

Claude Lanzmann, director of SHOAH

A thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author... Binet manages it all with beautiful lucidity and...discreet storytelling mastery

James Lasdun, Guardian

A triumph

Patrick Freyne, Irish Times

A wonderful, ambitious book, and a triumph of translation

Colum McCann

An engrossing literary experiment that still contains enough hard facts to function as a terrific yarn.

Andrzej Lukowski, Metro

Binet has created something fresh and original and at times funny (no easy task given the subject matter) making a historical tale which captures the imagination and is also an important read

Francesca Brown, Stylist

Binet provides both context and impressive detail on the eventual assassination of Heydrich

Mark Perryman, Philosophy Footbal

Binet’s debut is a masterpiece of historical fiction… gripping read

Daily Telegraph

Binet's approach may be new, but his story-telling instincts are nicely old fashioned. Translator Sam Wood does justice to the lucid prose

Independent

Brilliant..

Sunday Times, Style

By the time I got to the last page of Binet's masterpiece, I had to close my eyes and rethink history. I'm rethinking it still

Gary Shteyngart

Compelling

Barry Egan, The Sunday Independent

Dazzling... It's stunningly brilliant

Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday

Extraordinary first novel...a literary triumph...The book's final section, which recounts the assassination and subsequent manhunt in minute detail, is a masterpiece of tension, and its closing pages are extremely moving. Very few page-turners come as smart and original as this

Chris Power, The Times

French newcomer Laurent Binet hits the ground running in the engrossing novel within a novel

Sunday Telegraph

Fresh, honest and exciting

Anthony Cummins, Spectator

HHhH is an astonishing book—absorbing, moving, for the agony and acuity with which its author engages the problem of making literary art from unbearable historical fact.

Wells Tower

Historial fiction for grown-ups

Robert McCrum, Observer

Is it a novel about the Nazis? Or is it a memoir about a historian trying to write about the Nazis? Somehow, it’s both – and it’s brilliant

William Leith, Evening Standard

Laurent Binet has given a new dimension to the non-fiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that, and the climax is unforgettable

David Lodge

Magnificent ... unsurpassable ... told with grace and elegance ... exerts a hypnotic sway over the reader ... something of a Greek tragedy and of the splendid thriller ... All the details have such persuasive force that they remain indelibly recorded in the memory of the reader

Mario Vargas Llosa

Mesmeric stuff; history brought to chilling, potent life

Leyla Sanai, Independent on Sunday

Mindblowing...obsessed with the past but gleaming with radical innovation, it's urgent and new and terrifying and beautiful and pretty much the best thing that's happened in fiction for ages

Stuart Hammond, Dazed and Confused

Stunning

Donal O’Donoghue, RTE Guide

This book fully justifies the lavish praise adorning its author

Absolutely Chelsea

Thrilling and engaging...Binet brilliantly builds the tension in the lead up to the assassination attempt, likewise the nerve-shredding aftermath of the incident.... Being so experimental yet so compelling as a writer is a real high-wire act, one only precious few authors have managed. Binet does it dazzlingly here, and I'm excited about what he's going to write next

Doug Johnstone, Big Issue

Thrilling.

Killian Fox, Observer

Utterly compelling and ruthlessly fascinating

Laurence Mackin, Irish Times

With its slightly skewed perspective and the relative freshness of its approach, HHhH compels us once again to consider that this, surely, was humanity's lowest point: a war waged, not against those who thwarted Germany's territorial ambitions, but against all that was good and decent in the human soul. In so doing, it confounds those who would decry post-modernism as wilfully obscure, relativistic and lacking in conviction

Alastair Mabbott, Herald