Six Minutes in May

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What to expect

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Six Minutes in May by Nicholas Shakespeare, read by Peter Noble.

London, May 1940. Britain is under threat of invasion and Neville Chamberlain’s government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking the helm, but in Six Minutes in May Nicholas Shakespeare shows how easily events could have gone in a different direction.

It took just six minutes for MPs to cast the votes that brought down Chamberlain. Shakespeare moves from Britain’s disastrous battle in Norway, for which many blamed Churchill, on to the dramatic developments in Westminster that led to Churchill becoming Prime Minister. Uncovering fascinating new research and delving into the key players’ backgrounds, Shakespeare gives us a new perspective on this critical moment in our history.


*** Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Observer and The Economist ***

‘A gripping story of Churchill’s unlikely rise to power’ Observer

‘Totally captivating. It will stand as the best account of those extraordinary few days for very many years’ Andrew Roberts

Critics Review

History books should give us insight and information, surprise and entertainment, and allow us to see the world, an incident or a character differently. Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May delivers in abundance.
Observer, Best Books of 2017
Unputdownable… Us[es] new evidence with a novelist’s feeling for personality and atmosphere
Guardian, Best Books of 2017
Of the abundant new books on the Second World War, Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May…takes the prize. The familiar story of how Churchill unexpectedly became prime minister in 1940 has never been told so amusingly, nor in such detail
Daily Telegraph, Best History Books of 2017
Nicholas Shakespeare’s Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister…is as gripping as a novel. Apart from being meticulously researched, thoroughly original and beautifully written, the book is an important reminder of the fact that the direction of history can change in a heartbeat
History Today, Best History Books of 2017
An eloquent study in how quickly the political landscape can change -- and history with it
The Economist, Books of the Year 2017
A superbly written drama... Shakespeare's research is thorough and he has a novelist's flair for depicting the characters and motives of great and lesser men...Fascinating.
The Times
Shakespeare brings both meticulous research and fictional artistry to illuminate the machinery of government under extreme stress and the abrasive conflict of large, self-confident personalities. It's a superb achievement.
Ian McEwan
Riveting…never less than gripping. But the real delight of its book is the convincing, and often revelatory, portraits of the main protagonists.
Evening Standard.
Brilliant, meticulous…This scintillating joy of a book — with a military narrative of British shame as well handled as William Dalrymple’s Return of a King, and a treatment of 20th-century British politics, romance, humiliation and desire as grandly realised as Anthony Powell’s great novel sequence….Shakespeare’s narrative is not just more reliable than Churchill’s, but more fun.
Spectator
Superb: far and away the best account of the moment which changed our national life and the world, and filled with extraordinary new details. Shakespeare brings a novelist's eye to the characters he writes about, but it is the extraordinary way he marshals his material, far more extensive than I've come across before, which makes this book quite simply magnificent.
John Simpson

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