Never surrender

Winston Churchill embarks on a battle of wills with Adolf Hitler in the run-up to Dunkirk.

The compelling new historical novel from the acclaimed author of Winston's War. 10 May 1940. In the early hours Hitler launches his attack on France, Holland and Belgium.

The Phoney War is at an end. In four weeks, Hitler will win the most devastating series of victories in the history of modern warfare that will make him master of Europe.

A few hours after Hitler's attack begins, Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister of a beleaguered, confused and dispirited Britain.

He is surrounded by intrigue and mistrusted by his colleagues, who within days will plot to throw him out of office.

He is also about to suffer the most humiliating military setback at Dunkirk that brings Britain within hours of defeat and surrender.

This is the story of those four crucial weeks in which Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler were pitted against each other, man to man, mind to mind, in a confrontation that both came to regard as a personal battle of wills.

Their clash began immediately, on 10 May, when Churchill sent a letter to the old German Kaiser, Wilhelm II.It continued as first Holland and then Belgium surrendered, and Churchill used his opponents within his own War Cabinet to confuse and outwit Hitler. And while the Wehrmacht's panzers drove remorselessly through France and towards Dunkirk, Churchill used his most secret weapon, a young and resourceful woman called Emma, to sow such confusion within the Nazi ranks that would give the British forces pinned down on the beaches of Dunkirk three vital days to sail away and to survive.

Britain would fight on. By the end of those four weeks, Hitler was at the gates of Paris and master of all he surveyed.

But Churchill had already broken him on the most crucial battlefield of all, the battlefield of the mind.