As moving as it is gripping. A winner on all fronts. Booklist (starred review) Heart-pounding This is Gross s best work yet, with his heart and soul imprinted on every page. Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Poland. 1944. Alfred Mendl and his family are brought on a crowded train to a Nazi concentration camp after being caught trying to flee Paris with forged papers. His family is torn away from … flee Paris with forged papers. His family is torn away from him on arrival, his life s work burned before his eyes. To the guards, he is just another prisoner, but in fact Mendl a renowned physicist holds knowledge that only two people in the world possess. And the other is already at work for the Nazi war machine.
Four thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, Intelligence lieutenant Nathan Blum routinely decodes messages from occupied Poland. Having escaped the Krakow ghetto as a teenager after the Nazis executed his family, Nathan longs to do more for his new country in the war. But never did he expect the proposal he receives from Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS: to sneak into the most guarded place on earth, a living hell, on a mission to find and escape with one man, the one man the Allies believe can ensure them victory in the war.
Bursting with compelling characters and tense story lines, this historical thriller from New York Times bestseller Andrew Gross is a deeply affecting, unputdownable series of twists and turns through a landscape at times horrifyingly familiar but still completely new and compelling.
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Can’t put it down, very moving.nail biting suspense.
There is no real happily ever after but this book is one of the best i have ever read!!!!! Fantastic reading. I couldn’t leave it!!!!
Compelling, I couldn’t put it down, tears at times, horror in description of camps, unbelievable hero
Great historic novel.
Didn’t want to put the book down. Very suspenseful and a page turner. I loved it and so has everyone I have recommended it to!
It was the most intense book I have ever read, but it was also very hard to find a stopping place, even at the end of a chapter. Terrible situations for the Jewish families in German prison camps but this story was about the plans to rescue the one man, a Jewish physicist, who could help the US complete the code for building the atomic bomb and end the war. The story was very well written and thought out. Exciting, scary, tense situations, and a very interesting read. I feel it was one of the best books I’ve ever read and highly recommend it.
A well written, sad and poignant novel about WWII and the courage of several people to right the wrongs and they to save as many as they could.
I will recommend this book to anyone who reads. Not a romance, but filled with love; not the typical thriller, but suspense filled; not the usual action but a unrelenting pace; historical but fictional. Read and enjoy, everyone!
Absolutely outstanding!
This was by and far my favorite book of the year. It had great characters, action, suspense, and a great historical period story.
The One Man is a well written novel that grabs your attention right from the beginning and is hard to put down.
I read this a year ago, and thoughts of this book are always with me. A fantastic book from a terrible time in our history. Exceptional writing by Andrew Gross.
I really enjoyed reading my first Andrew Gross novel. I thought the characters were believable, though Greta’s and Leo’s relationship became a bit too contrived for the sake of the plot for my liking, I still enjoyed the story. I found enough surprises, wondering how events would unfold, to keep me turning pages. The minor characters seemed to be this story’s crown jewel, and from an historical perspective, the Polish Resistance was nicely researched so that their role seemed more fact than fiction. While the overall concept seems ludicrous, Gross takes the right amount of time developing Nathan’s character and how desperate the Allies were to win the war expeditiously, that voluntarily sneaking in to Auschwitz no longer seemed fantastically illiterate but truly plausible. I personally could have done without the cat story, but I understood its role.
While Auschwitz serves as almost half the story’s setting, Gross does not get bogged down in writing about Auschwitz, itself. Yet, through both major and minor characters and their will to survive, readers conceptually understand another, interesting perspective as to what life was like inside Auschwitz without sacrificing history for the sake of a novel.
The one place where I think history was bent to fit the story, centers on Roosevelt. Having studied FDR during the war years, and especially having detailed understanding of the 1943 Bermuda Conference, Gross’ FDR is a much better guy than he was in real life. It is historical fiction, and choosing to write FDR as we wished he would have behaved versus how he actually behaved, can be attributed to artistic license, hope, and good will.