The Doomsday Timetable

From the Treaty of Versailles to the first bombs falling on Warsaw, the countdown to catastrophe, told through the forms that filed it into existence.

“This is not peace. This is an armistice for twenty years.”

A German diplomat spoke those words in 1919. He was wrong by only thirty-seven days.

A sweeping work of historical fiction that traces the path from the humiliations of Versailles to the morning Neville Chamberlain told Britain it was at war. But this is not a story of great men making great decisions. It is the story of how civilization can be dismantled—not by barbarians at the gates, but by mild-mannered men in well-pressed suits checking the appropriate boxes.

Available on: