Churchill's Triumph

For eight days, beginning on Saturday, February 3, 1945, the most powerful men in the world – Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin – met at the Black Sea Resort of Yalta, where in the most momentous conference of the century, they preceded to divide up Europe. This novel, told from Churchill's point of view, takes you behind the scenes and brings you into the minds and hearts of the big three leaders: the dominating and seemingly all-powerful Joseph Stalin, with the largest army, and the mission of expanding the Soviet Empire; an ailing and fragile Roosevelt, willing to make whatever compromises he felt he had to in order to bring Stalin and Russia into the final campaign against Japan; and Churchill, the least powerful of the three, but the most far-sighted, who could not count on Roosevelt as his ally, and could not tame the avaricious Russian bear, determined to gobble up the nations around and beyond it. Like a fly on the wall of history, the reader becomes a hidden witness to these monumental negotiations, witnessing negotiations that would betray the heroic struggle of millions who died and fought in the Great War.

Meanwhile, a Polish count who has taken on the persona of a deceased soldier appears in Churchill's suite to reveal one of the great unknown secrets of that time: the Soviet's systematic execution of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn, the mass murder that the Russians eventually blamed on the Germans. His courageous defiance of the German army's occupation of his village, and his village's fate at the hands of the victorious Russian army, serve as a profoundly moving subplot to the larger story. Churchill's Triumph allows the reader to eavesdrop on the world's most powerful men, as they lie, cheat, and deceive each other as they struggle to reach agreement and secure their places in history.

All the historical aspects of the story are accurate, down to the last detail, including the spice Stalin put in his vodka. A bestseller in England, Churchill's Triumph received widespread press coverage and reviews:

"His portrait of Churchill is as masterly as ever: a wonderful compound of bluster, sentimentality, grumpiness and indefatigable physical energy. There are the usual elegant metaphors… In the tragedy of Poland burning while statesmen fiddled, Dobbs has found a theme worthy of his powers."
–Sunday Telegraph

"How do you delight the profit-maximising big retailers while at the same time writing something dark and moving? Michael Dobbs knows how…Dobbs knows his sources, but the dialogue is his own: good, clean, moving briskly and underpinned by the record, it conveys historical truth. As for Poland, it suffered all the horrors. Dobbs writes about the country with tight passion, transferring to his fictional village, Piorun, the rape, murder and savage enforcement by Germans and Russians which, so far away and so little regarded, actually happened. The old women weeping, the houses burned down, the bodies left promiscuously on the street are history set out for the attention of novel-readers, memorable instruction in human grief… Furiously told and compelling, Churchill's Triumph is a thinking man's bestseller." –The Guardian