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The Book of Kings

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The Book of Kings

By: James Thackara
Narrated by: Robert Whitfield
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About this listen

 The Book of Kings is an epic novel that begins in the years shortly before World War II and leads up to the present day. While Europe drifts toward Nazism, four students share an apartment on the rue de Fleurus in Paris. Thackara brilliantly forges the stories of these four men whose lives mirror the larger picture.

The title alludes to God's prophetic warning to Samuel about the rise of man-made kings. James Thackara, as John Walsh wrote in The New Yorker, "watches Hitler's rise from a dozen different perspectives: at Nuremberg rallies; as reported in dinner table gossip; in close-up appearances at Hindenburg's side; in letters and rumors of war; in the gradually thickening atmosphere of fright and inevitability."

A work of extraordinary vision and range, The Book of Kings magnificently fuses myth and the inexorable events of history.

©1999 James Thackara (P)2002 Blackstone Audiobooks Fiction Historical Fiction War & Military War King Royalty France Military Imperialism Interwar Period

Critic Reviews

"Absorbing...when you encounter one of the huge set-pieces that punctuate the action you are rocked on your heels." (The New Yorker)
"The book nobody should miss reading....Comparisons to War and Peace may be effusive but not totally unwarranted....A crowning achievement." (The Seattle Times)

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