Half a Crown

In an chillingly altered 1960, Jo Walton's "Half a Crown" plunges readers into a Britain shaped by the 1941 'Farthing Peace' – a grim rapprochement with Nazi Germany. The upper echelons of British society continue their opulent existence, while the Watch, Britain's secret police led by the pragmatic Peter Carmichael, brutally enforces the regime's ideology, ferrying 'undesirables' to cattle cars bound for the East. As a global peace conference convenes in London, with Hitler himself on British soil to oversee the final partition of the world, old tensions resurface. The long-exiled Duke of Windsor returns, possibly orchestrating a coup via the rising 'British Power' street gangs who deem the government too lenient. Amidst this powder keg of political intrigue and fascist oppression, an unlikely alliance forms: Carmichael, the very embodiment of the oppressive state, and a young debutante whose privileged world is about to be shattered, must join forces to confront the terrifying forces threatening to unravel their compromised nation.