Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The “entertaining [and] often-moving account” (The Wall Street Journal) of the remarkable POWs whose relentlessly creative attempts to escape a notorious Nazi prison embodied the spirit of resistance against fascism, from the author of The Spy and the Traitor “Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history.”—David Grann, author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon 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’s telling, Colditz’s most famous names—like the indomitable Pat Reid—share 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’s 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’s arc from within Colditz’s stone walls, where the stakes rose as Hitler’s 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.

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Reviews

Praise for Ben Macintyre John le Carre 's nonfiction counterpart. -The New York Times Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history. -David Grann One of the most gifted espionage writers around. -Annie Jacobsen Macintyre is a supremely gifted storyteller. . . . His books are absurdly entertaining. -The Boston Globe

Praise for Prisoners of the Castle Riveting . . . This is another engrossing tale of WWII intrigue from a master of the genre. -Publishers Weekly A mixture of derring-do and a vivid, warts-and-all portrayal of the iconic castle. -Kirkus Reviews Praise for Ben Macintyre John le Carre 's nonfiction counterpart. -The New York Times Macintyre has a knack for finding the most fascinating story lines in history. -David Grann One of the most gifted espionage writers around. -Annie Jacobsen Macintyre is a supremely gifted storyteller. . . . His books are absurdly entertaining. -The Boston Globe

Author Information

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (U.K.) and the bestselling author of Agent Sonya, The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

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