Jean-Noël Orengo

David Watson

A masterfully unconventional novel about Speer’s two lives: as Hitler’s personal architect, ally and confidant; and as the world’s idealised specimen of a “good Nazi”... a character study of a man who manipulated one of the most powerful men on Earth

Portraying Speer's trajectory from urban planner to minister for armaments (and, eventually, jail after the Nuremberg trials), it unfolds as a chillingly ordinary workplace drama... Orengo's highly effective storytelling technique mixes an elegant filleting of secondary sources with crisp reflections of truth and falsehood

An intriguing factual novel... thought-provoking. It makes you think hard about culpability, about the struggle to keep your sense of right and wrong in a totalitarian system

Superb... a work of metahistory... Like a mystery, it is concerned with guilt and accountability... The reader of this lucid, elegant novel is left to reflect on the many ways in which, in the wrong hands, art and memory can conspire to obscure as well as to illuminate

The truth behind 'the good Nazi'... thought-provoking... a hybrid of historical essay and novel

In telling Speer's story, Orengo largely forsakes traditional fiction techniques... this allies the book with other self-consciously historical novels, or novelistic histories, including Laurent Binet's HHhH, Eric Vuillard's The Order of the Day and Benjamin Labatut's The Maniac

A stark exploration of Albert Speer … surgical, almost forensic in its historical investigation

A wonderfully intelligent and radical portrait of Albert Speer. Fascinating, a triumph

‘Which is the most seductive, truth or fiction?’ 
 
This is the story of Albert Speer: The protégé. The ‘good Nazi’. The star. The mythmaker. 
 
In 1969 Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, claiming to have known nothing about the Final Solution, he declares himself ‘collectively responsible, but not individually guilty’. 
 
It is one of the greatest lies in history. 
 
Jean-Noël Orengo’s electrifying novel is the story of a man who saved his skin through the countless fictions he created about himself. A man with a talent for survival, who dazzled those around him with his monuments to power and then, escaping death, reinvented himself as a bestselling author. A man once described as the Führer's unrequited love. 
 
It is a story of power and ambition, self-interest and self-deceit – and what happens in a war over the truth.

Jean-Noël Orengo

Series by Jean-Noël Orengo

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