Having enjoyed Robert Harris’s Fatherland, I decided to check out SS-GB on the basis of Harris’s recommendation. Harris’s debt (which he has acknowledged) is obvious – in a sense Fatherland is merely a retelling of SS-GB, with key elements (premise, characters) transposed from early-1940s London to early-1960s Berlin. But aided by the shift in setting and (or so I would judge) Harris’s greater imagination, Fatherland portrays a world both more vivid world and more horrifying.

That’s not to say SS-GB isn’t worth reading. It’s an entertaining thriller, with a spectacular plot twist in the middle, and some nice characterization, particularly of the protagonist’s two German bosses, one supercilious, the other disingenuous. On the other hand, the “American lady reporter love interest” character is laughably shallow, not to say depressingly sexist.

Eh, give it a go, if, like me, you’re fascinated by the “What if the Germans won WW2” subgenre.