When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth. Berlin, 1943. A group of high-society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer afternoon.
They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo - revealing their secret to the Nazis' most ruthless detective. They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador's widow and a pioneering headmistress. Meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule, what unites them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance.
Or so they believe. How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap? And who betrayed them? Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich's cruellest men, they showed a heroism that raises a question with new urgency for our time: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?
PRAISE FOR THE ESCAPE ARTIST:
'Gripping' Guardian
'Magnificent' Philip Pullman
'An immediate classic' Antony Beevor
'Utterly compelling' Philippe Sands'
A must-read' Emily Maitlis