I recommend Forester to every literate I know

I find Hornblower admirable, vastly entertaining

An intelligent thriller . . . with exacting attention to historical detail

A gripping account of the negotiations between Britain and Germany in 1938 before the outbreak of war

Atmospheric and fast-paced literary thriller . . . [it] grips from start to finish . . . Superb

Unputdownable to the point of being dangerous: the house could have been on fire while I was reading and I wouldn’t have noticed

Harris makes the reader gasp at every turn, with a truly moving portrayal of Chamberlain as a man who did the wrong thing for the right reason

A brilliantly constructed spy novel set amid the politicking of Chamberlain’s last-ditch negotiations with Hitler

A tantalising addition to the inexhaustible game of “what if”?

A wonderful tale of personal relationships and political drama…This is a very, very good read

I enjoyed romping through Robert Harris’ Munich

Taut and finely paced novel . . . superbly observed . . . it is hard not to break out in a cold sweat just reading it….The details of railway carriages, hotel rooms, 10 Downing Street and even the Fuhrerbau in Berlin are faultless . . . an utterly compelling and fantastically tense historical thriller by a writer at the very top of his game.

What distinguishes Munich is the subtlety with which it uses the formulaic elements of the genre to explore the ethics of information and functions of bureaucracy

Fascinating . . . Seamlessly weaving his fictional tale into the real events of September 1938…Harris has once again shown himself to be a master storyteller

A novel of ideas and a gripping thriller… Harris is a marvellously compelling story-teller

With moral subtlety as well as storytelling skill, Harris makes us regret the better past that never happened — while mournfully accepting the bitter one that did

A fantastically entertaining historical novel that you won’t want to put down until you finish . . . For me, this is a better novel than Fatherland, which posited the ‘what if Hitler was still Fuhrer in 1964?’ scenario. It is altogether more grounded and serious, but equally enjoyable

Exerts a powerful grip

It’s hard to imagine how history can be told better

Lovely details. Clever Twists. Superb.

This novel is gripping from start to finish

In recent years there have been a number of very good novels by veterans of the Global War on Terror. None is as ambitious, inclusive or powerful as Brian Van Reet's Spoils; none has this novel's range or uncanny ability to transport the reader to the battlefield and those rarely explored margins at the battlefield's ragged edge. Spoils is a fantastic debut.

Vivid and fierce, Spoils is an eloquent exploration of humanity. Depicting a world with no obvious villains or heroes, this novel is as important as it is timely. By exploring the nuances of motivation, loyalty, and sacrifice, Van Reet exposes the connections that bind us across even the greatest divides.

The brilliance of Brian Van Reet’s Spoils lies not only in the sheer forward-motion velocity of its plotting, but in the psychological terrain it explores: what a generation of young women and men went looking for in Iraq, what they found, and why that discovery matters so profoundly for the rest of us.

In Spoils, Van Reet has imbued his subject with subtlety — something that it is so often stripped of, both by combatants and the media. One rarely sees a war novel by a soldier with such convincing writing on both sides of the trenches.

This is a great novel… Brian Van Reet [is] a special talent.

An honest glimpse into the action, emotion and futility of war.

The action is realistic and relentless, the writing lean and muscular, the tale harrowing, and the horrors seemingly inevitable but no less powerful for that.

In dazzling and propulsive prose, Brian Van Reet explores the lives on both sides of the battle lines… Depicting a war spinning rapidly out of control, destined to become a modern classic, Spoils is an unsparing and morally complex novel that chronicles the achingly human cost of combat.

Spoils reeks of the fog and futility of war… It has its own blue-collar beauty as it tells its tale from three perspectives: a gay, female US soldier, an Egyptian jihadist and a US tank commander.

Brian Van Reet has firsthand combat experience to draw upon for this powerful piece of fiction, rendering it an intensely humane story, giving credible authenticity to the plot, and scenes presented to the reader… Enlightening, thought provoking and hauntingly mesmerising, I cannot recommend Spoils highly enough to anyone interested in novels about war and conflict.

Every page brims with brutal authenticity.

Spoils bears eye-widening witness to valour, horror, violence, cruelty and absurdity.