Will I love V2?

V2 is a gripping wartime thriller that blends meticulous historical detail with relentless suspense. Harris delivers a tense, character-driven narrative that captures the peril and ingenuity of the rocket war.

I loved the intermingling of history and story, research and plot, in this book. The period details were spot on, and I’ve always been fascinated by the Nazi rocketry program. The underlay of how a great scientific idea can be perverted to unintended consequences was intriguing and frightfully realistic for modern times.

The counterplay between the V2 engineer and the British spy trying to stop V2 launches fascinated me. I loved the conflicted morality of the engineer who wanted to shoot the rocket to the moon instead of at people. 

Harris is such a literary and historical giant that it’s easy to take him for granted. The tension in the recent film, Munich: The Edge of War, was palpable, but V2 is even more gripping, an eye-opening and rattling good yarn set over a period of just a few critical days at a time when the Nazis were increasing their deadly rocket attacks on England.

I especially enjoyed how artfully the two stories were woven together, as it portrays the crisis from two opposite standpoints: the male German engineer drawn into the nightmarish world of Hitler’s fanaticism, and that of… show more.

This is a novel that feels like a journalistic reportage, as it is almost factual in the way it is crisply written and for the accuracy of the historical detail the author injected in his story. I liked the exploration of the moral and ethical dilemma that German scientists faced in the development of the V2 rocket technology. Suspenseful and fascinating, with credible characters, Robert Harris masterfully depicts the two sides of the story in a well-paced page-turner that makes an informative, engrossing, and interesting read.