From the bestselling author of Agent Zigzag comes “a terrific yarn”* that recently debuted at #1 on the UK’s bestseller lists.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
By Ben Macintyre
“London Times writer at large Macintyre skillfully unravels this crazy, brilliant plan by degree . . . A terrific yarn, full of details gleaned from painstaking detective work.” —Kirkus Reviews *
“A solid and entertaining updating of WWII’s best-known ‘human intelligence’ operation . . . Macintyre recounts their adventures and misadventures with panache.” —Publishers Weekly [boxed review]
Ben Macintyre, the critically acclaimed author of Agent Zigzag, returns this spring with an extraordinary account of the most successful deception—and certainly the strangest—ever carried out in World War II, one that changed the prospects for an Allied victory. In OPERATION MINCEMENT: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (Harmony; May 4, 2010), Macintyre colorfully re-creates an amazing chapter of the war with the same narrative brio and mischievous glee that made Agent Zigzag such a resounding success.
Near the end of WWII, two British naval officers came up with a brilliant yet slightly mad scheme to mislead the Nazi armies about where the Allies would attack southern Europe. To carry out the plan, they would have to rely on the most unlikely of secret agents: a dead man. They called it Operation Mincemeat. Macintyre’s dazzling new book, which includes information from rare, newly discovered documents, chronicles the astonishing story of what happened after British officials planted a dead body—outfitted in a British military uniform with a briefcase containing false intelligence documents—in Nazi territory, and how this secret mission fooled Hitler into changing military positioning, paving the way for the Allies to successfully overtake the Nazis.
OPERATION MINCEMEAT was recently published in the U.K., receiving rave reviews and landing at #1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Please see below for a sampling of praise:
“Fascinating . . . Macintyre’s great achievement in recounting OPERATION MINCEMEAT is to strip away the veils of jingoistic self-satisfaction and official secrecy and tell the story . . . in precise detail and with conclusive accuracy. . . . He has the instincts of a novelist rather than an historian when it comes to elision, exposition, narration and pace, and his depiction of character is vividly alive to nuance and idiosyncrasy.”
—William Boyd, The Times
“A terrific book . . . Students of the second world war have been familiar with Mincemeat for many years, but Macintyre offers a mass of new detail, and enchanting pen portraits of the British, Spanish and German participants. His book is a rollicking read for all those who enjoy a spy story so fanciful that Ian Fleming—himself an officer in Montagu’s wartime department—would never have dared to invent it.”
—Max Hastings, The Sunday Times
“Ben Macintyre, also the author of the acclaimed Agent Zigzag, is fast becoming a one-man industry in these updated tales of cunning, bravery and skulduggery . . . It is hard to think of a better guide to keep beckoning us back to that fascinating world.”
—Euan Ferguson, The Observer
“Macintyre has a journalist’s nose for a great story, and a novelist’s skill in its narration. If anything, Operation Mincemeat is even more spellbinding than his previous story of wartime espionage, Agent Zigzag, with a cast-list every bit as dotty and colourful. . . . Macintyre is a master of the thumbnail character sketch.”
—Craig Brown “Book of the Week,” Mail on Sunday
“Macintyre keeps the war’s broad sweep in focus, while fleshing out the human, frequently hilarious, background to Mincemeat. . . . With its fun, flair and sense of adventure, this book succeeds in making a complex wartime operation read like veritable spy fiction.”
—Andrew Lycett, The Telegraph
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large and associate editor of the Times of London. He is the author of, most recently, Agent Zigzag, which the New York Times hailed as “spellbinding” and Entertainment Weekly called “wildly improbable but entirely true.” He lives in London. For more information on the book and Ben, please visit www.benmacintyre.com.
ABOUT THE BOOK
OPERATION MINCEMEAT: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
Harmony Books
On Sale: May 4, 2010 • ISBN 978-0-307-45327-3 • Price: $25.99
For more information on the book and Ben Macintyre, please contact:
Jill Browning, Senior Publicist at Crown, 212-572-6182 or jibrowning@randomhouse.com
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