Enigma Mass Market Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Harris Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0804115486 | Format: PDF
Enigma Mass Market Description
Amazon.com Review
A gripping World War II mystery novel with a cryptographic twist,
Enigma's hero is Tom Jericho, a brilliant British mathematician working as a member of the team struggling to crack the Nazi Enigma code. Jericho's own struggles include nerve-wracking mental labor, the mysterious disappearance of a former girlfriend, the suspicions of his co-workers within the paranoid high-security project, and the certainty that someone close to him, perhaps the missing girl, is a Nazi spy. The plot is pure fiction but the historical background, Alan Turing's famous wartime computing project that cracked the German U-boat communications code, is real and accurately portrayed. Enigma is convincingly plotted, forcefully written, and filled with well drawn characters; in short, it's everything a good technomystery should be.
From Publishers Weekly
Set during WWII, Harris's latest thriller concerns the British attempt to crack the Nazis' secret codes.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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- Mass Market Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Ballantine Books (September 1, 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0804115486
- ISBN-13: 978-0804115483
- Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.3 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
In his terrific speculative thriller, Fatherland, Robert Harris plopped us down in the middle of an alternate reality where Nazi Germany had won a stalemate with the United States and Hitler was about to celebrate his 75th birthday in 1964. The book was plausible and very exciting, but best of all it confronted readers with the similarity between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and implicitly asked why the west fought one and aided the other. Now, in Enigma, he shows that he can work equally effectively against the backdrop of actual events and still broach big ideas.
It's February, 1943 and Tom Jericho, a brilliant young Cambridge mathematician and protégé of Alan Turing, has already suffered one nervous breakdown under the pressure of working to break secret Nazi codes. Now he's summoned back to Bletchley Park because the U-boat code, known as Shark, which was previously decrypted due to an epiphany of his, has suddenly been changed just as an enormous supply convoy from America is setting out for Britain. Despite his delicate mental state, it's felt that he'll be valuable just for his totemic value and to reassure the higher-ups that all the best men are working on the problem.
Complicating matters is the disappearance of Jericho's ex-girlfriend, Claire Romilly, who it appears may have tipped off the Germans that their codes had been cracked. At any rate, some must have betrayed this vital secret, and, even as the supply convoy sails towards one of the biggest U-boat wolfpacks ever assembled, Jericho sets out to discover who the traitor is and where Claire has disappeared too.
The author too manages a difficult feat as he balances the mystery plot with healthy dollops of WWII history and cryptographic technique.
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