The Folio Society Illustrated Edition of “Fatherland” is a must-have for fans of Robert Harris and the alternative history genre

More than three decades after its original release Fatherland – author Robert Harris’s first foray into the world of fiction and a stunning piece of speculative storytelling – is as powerful as ever.

Thanks to Folio Society, fans of the 1992 alternate history novel can relive the convoluted investigation by a Kriminalpolizei investigator. Xavier March in a never-before-seen hardcover collector’s edition (on sale now) featuring an introduction by Graham Hurley and seven original illustrations by Robert Carter.

“Robert Harris appeals to everything. He is an absolute master storyteller,” says Folio Publishing Director Tom Walker. “He just has the ability to completely immerse himself in a culture, make you completely believe it’s real, and then tell a thriller on top of it.”

Nowhere is this skill more evident than on the inside Fatherlandwhich drops the reader into a horrifyingly believable reality where Nazi Germany emerged victorious from World War II and realized a sickly oversized Germania. For three decades, the Third Reich has enjoyed a simulacrum of peace and prosperity, albeit in a Cold War deadlock with the United States funding Soviet guerillas in this Vietnam. All of this is about to end with the upcoming visit of President Joseph P. Kennedy.

The Nazi regime welcomes this possibility of mitigation and does so any to ensure its success. Enter police detective Xavier “Zavi” March to throw a wrench into the gears. He is part of a dying breed, one of the last decent and independent-thinking souls in a Kafkaesque system of pernicious conformity and constant fear perpetuated by hypocritical opportunists, embarrassing toads and power-hungry lunatics who rely on Gestapo assassins. dirty work. When the body of Josef Bühler, an early supporter of the National Socialist movement, washes up on Havel’s shores just days from Hitler’s 75th birthday party in April 1964, the stubbornly committed March teams up with American journalist Charlotte Maguire. away from the rotting scab of the Führer’s thousand-year empire, finally solving the mystery of what happened to Europe’s Jewish population.

In red, white and black – the three colors of the Nazis’ infamous swastika – Carter’s illustrations conjure up a dark, brutalist reflection of 60s pop art, making them the perfect companion and story for the retro era. and in a fascist environment where all outside influences – from magazines to jazz – are brutally sanitized to conform to the principles of the empire. joyless and harsh standards. One could almost see them as in-universe Joseph Goebbels commissioned propaganda for the “decadent” art of American artists like Andy Warhol.

The rare pops of dissident color, provided by Charlotte’s blue raincoat and yellow phone booth, remind us of what’s at stake: freedom and hope within and beyond the grim borders of the new German Empire. “We thought his work was really amazing – almost garishly colorful and a very bold, confident image,” explains Walker. “We were interested in what he could do Fatherland.”

“In FatherlandMagician Harris opened a whole new bag of narrative tricks,” Hurley writes in his introduction. And indeed, the book set a new standard for the alternative history genre. Its seamless union of fact and fiction, effortlessly wrapped around a fluid neo-noir conspiracy thriller, follows—and in many cases improves upon—Philip K. Dick’s ground-breaking portrait of a world under Axis rule. The Man in the High Castleand at the same time laid the foundation for Michael Chabon Yiddish Police Union and more recently by Francis Spufford Cahokia Jazz.

Simply put, Harris’s masterful contribution to the stockpile of parallel-dimensional literature is one of the best what-if scenarios ever to appear on paper, and if it had appeared just three years later, it would surely be a shoe-in for a Sidewise Award (the highest honor given to those writers brave enough to glimpse into the multiverse and report what they see ). The Folio Society edition gives Fatherland the respect it so richly deserves, and when I picked up a copy that I devoured voraciously over the course of a day (feverishly turning the pages even though I knew the inevitable outcome), I was reminded why it remains one of my favorite books in the world.

“Did history change so easily?” March reflects on a point in the story in what feels to the reader with a meta-eye. If you’re Robert Harris, timeline edits aren’t just easy, they give you the impetus for one hell of a ride.

The Folio Society edition of the Fatherland is now on sale here.