NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER \u2022 The \u201centertaining yet objective and often-moving account\u201d (The Wall Street Journal) of one of history\u2019s most notorious prisons\u2014and the remarkable cast of POWs who tried relentlessly to escape their captors, from the author of The Spy and the Traitor \u201cNot since Ian Fleming and John le Carr\u00e9 has a spy writer so captivated readers.\u201d\u2014The Hollywood Reporter In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. But as Macintyre shows, the story of Colditz was about much more than escape. Its population represented a society in miniature, full of heroes and traitors, class conflicts and secret alliances, and the full range of human joy and despair. In Macintyre\u2019s telling, Colditz\u2019s most famous names\u2014like the indomitable Pat Reid\u2014share glory with lesser known but equally remarkable characters like Indian doctor Birendranath Mazumdar whose ill treatment, hunger strike, and eventual escape read like fiction; Florimond Duke, America\u2019s oldest paratrooper and least successful secret agent; and Christopher Clayton Hutton, the brilliant inventor employed by British intelligence to manufacture covert escape aids for POWs. Prisoners of the Castle traces the war\u2019s arc from within Colditz\u2019s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler\u2019s war machine faltered and the men feared that liberation would not come soon enough to spare them a grisly fate at the hands of the Nazis. Bringing together the wartime intrigue of his acclaimed Operation Mincemeat and keen psychological portraits of his bestselling true-life spy stories, Macintyre has breathed new life into one of the greatest war stories ever told.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER \u2022 The \u201centertaining yet objective and often-moving account\u201d (The Wall Street Journal) of one of history\u2019s most notorious prisons\u2014and the remarkable…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","book_status":[],"book_genre":[],"class_list":["post-13963","book","type-book","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book\/13963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/book"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13963"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"book_status","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book_status?post=13963"},{"taxonomy":"book_genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myriad.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/book_genre?post=13963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}