Haus Publishing The Armchair Traveller january-june

Night of
the Physicists
Operation Epsilon: Heisenberg, Hahn,
Weizsäcker and the German Bomb
Richard von Schirach
Translated by Simon Pare
£14.99 | HISTORY
AUGUST 2015
PBK, TRADE
p: 978-1-908323-85-9
e: 978-1-908323-86-6
280pp | ILLUSTRATED
WORLD ENGLISH
A Night in the
Emperor’s Garden
A True Story of Hope
and Resilience in Afghanistan
Qais Akbar Omar and
Stephen Landrigan
£14.99 | MEMOIR
HBK, TRADE
OCTOBER 2014
p: 978-1-910376-12-6
e: 978-1-910376-20-1
330pp | ILLUSTRATED
WORLD
In the spring of 1945 the Allies arrested the physicists they believed had worked on the
German nuclear programme during the war. Interned in an English country house, their
conversations were secretly recorded. MI6’s Operation Epsilon sought to determine how
close Nazi Germany had come to building an atomic bomb. It was in this remote setting
– Farm Hall, near Cambridge – that the German physicists first heard of the bombing of
Hiroshima.
August 6 1945 was a night that changed the course of history. The terrible weapon
unleashed on Japan caused unprecedented destruction and loss of life. That the Allies
had such a weapon at their disposal came as a great shock to the German scientists who
had worked under the assumption that the Allies knew nothing of nuclear fission. This is
the story of the wartime race to develop an atomic bomb, and the genius, guilt, complicity
and hubris of Nobel Prize-winning scientists working to create a weapon that would
undoubtedly have won the war for the Germans.
Richard von Schirach is a journalist, historian and the author of The Shadow of My Father
(2005).
In 2005, a group of Afghan actors searched for new opportunities to perform after years of
war and Taliban rule. One was a police detective and a widow determined to create images
of strong women. Another had trained at Kabul University before he fled to Pakistan as
a refugee. A third was a street beggar who had broken hearts around the world in the title
role of the award-winning film Osama, yet she barely knew how to read or write. Then
there was the middle-aged housewife whose life-long dreams of being an actress came at
an unspeakable price.
These actors, joined by a half-dozen others, enlisted a French actress visiting Kabul
as their director. For the next five months they worked tirelessly. They extended their
Afghan passion for poetry to encompass one of Shakespeare’s most lyrical plays, Love’s
Labour’s Lost, in their own Dari language. For the first time in thirty years, men and
women would appear on stage together. This is their story.
Qais Akbar Omar is the author of the internationally acclaimed memoir A Fort of Nine
Towers and is currently a Scholars at Risk Fellow at Harvard. Stephen Landrigan is a
playwright and former journalist for The Washington Post and BBC Radio.
12 RECENTLY PUBLISHED
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
13