The Promise Of Yalta

Synopsis

This is a clever political novel that is set against the 1945 Yalta Conference. February 1945. The Yalta Conference. Crimea. As Hitler's Germany staggers to the brink of defeat, the Big Three - Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt - meet to thrash out the beginnings of a new world order. All is at stake: the birth of the United Nations, the sovereignty of Poland, the conclusion of the Pacific War; reparations, borders, the division of spoils...Present in the British delegation is Jimmy Bexley, a young aide to Winston Churchill. Yet Bexley is a man with a secret - a personal dilemma that mirrors in complexity and implacability, the bitter political machinations of Yalta. Berlin. The 1930s. Bexley, a Cambridge undergraduate, seeks answers to the seeming futility of his father's death in the Great War. Instead, he discovers a world gearing up for another inevitable conflict: the rise of Nazism; the steady march of communism; radicals, fanatics, ideologues, dilettantes on the Left and Right, all hell-bent on redefining the world. Here the seeds are sown for all that will follow: for global history and for Jimmy's own personal journey - a journey that will take him up close and personal with the Nazi menace; to the periphery of radical left-wing politics; to the service of Britain's greatest 20th-century statesman; to a deadly East - West cat and mouse game in the name of love. And ultimately to the impossible promise of Yalta...