Enigma [Hardcover]

Robert Harris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 11, 1995

"LITERATE AND SAVVY . . . BRIMS WITH WARTIME INTRIGUE."
--The Washington Post Book World
England 1943. Much of the infamous Nazi Enigma code has been cracked. But Shark, the impenetrable operational cipher used by Nazi U-boats, has masked the Germans' movements, allowing them to destroy a record number of Allied vessels. Feeling that the blood of Allied sailors is on their hands, a top-secret team of British cryptographers works feverishly around the clock to break Shark. And when brilliant mathematician Tom Jericho succeeds, it is the stuff of legend. . . .
"A TENSE AND THOUGHTFUL THRILLER."
--San Francisco Chronicle
Until the unthinkable happens: the Germans have somehow learned that Shark has been cracked. And they've changed the code. . . .
"SUSPENSEFUL AND FASCINATING."
--The Orlando Sentinel
As an Allied convoy crosses the U-boat infested North Atlantic . . . as Jericho's ex-lover Claire disappears amid accusations that she is a Nazi collaborator . . . as Jericho strains his last resources to break Shark again, he cannot escape the ultimate truth: There is a traitor among them. . . .
"GRIPPING . . . CAPTIVATING ."
--New York Daily News
"ELEGANTLY RESEARCHED . . . Readers will find themselves perfectly placed to experience one of Britain's finest hours."
--People
"SATISFYING . . . Harris does a crackerjack job here, playing his characters' lives off historical events in surprising ways."
--Entertainment Weekly
"SUSPENSEFUL . . . FIENDISHLY CLEVER."
--Detroit Free Press


From the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A gripping World War II mystery novel with a cryptographic twist, Enigma's hero is Tom Jericho, a brilliant British mathematician working as a member of the team struggling to crack the Nazi Enigma code. Jericho's own struggles include nerve-wracking mental labor, the mysterious disappearance of a former girlfriend, the suspicions of his co-workers within the paranoid high-security project, and the certainty that someone close to him, perhaps the missing girl, is a Nazi spy. The plot is pure fiction but the historical background, Alan Turing's famous wartime computing project that cracked the German U-boat communications code, is real and accurately portrayed. Enigma is convincingly plotted, forcefully written, and filled with well drawn characters; in short, it's everything a good technomystery should be. --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Harris's follow-up to his bestselling fiction debut, Fatherland, is a high-adrenaline thriller set at Bletchley Park, the remote, ultra-secret WWII British codebreaking center. In February 1943, having just cracked the key to the confoundingly complex Nazi code known as Shark, Thomas Jericho, an unworldly young academic, returns to his old digs at Cambridge to recuperate from nervous exhaustion and a broken heart. But Jericho has time to regain only a modicum of strength before he is pressed back into service to break the latest Nazi code?the putatively impregnable Enigma, generated on Germany's diabolical new four-rotor encrypting machines. Returning to Bletchley Park, the young cryptanalyst fleetingly encounters Claire Romilly, his faithless lover, before she vanishes into the night. Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, three huge U.S. merchant marine convoys are steaming directly into a killer-pack of Nazi U-boats; unless Jericho can crack Enigma, the ships and their precious cargo of supplies and munitions will be destroyed. The situation complicates, with intimations of treason and chicanery at high levels, when Jericho discovers hidden in Claire's room four unencrypted intercepts that coincide with sudden radio silence from the Nazi subs. Aided by Claire's roommate, Hester Wallace, Jericho must battle clandestine interference from Britain's wartime hierarchy as he races to break the cypher, and to find out the secret of Claire's fate. Superbly drawn characters skulking through atmospherically grim settings hallmark this novel, a rare mix of cerebral and visceral thrills that features risky exploits complementing the exhilarating challenge?to both Jericho and the reader?of solving daunting puzzles within puzzles. It doesn't take a Jericho to decode where this book is headed: right on to the bestseller lists. BOMC featured selection; major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House (September 11, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679428879
• ISBN-13: 978-0679428879
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #89,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Harris is the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars another thoughtful thriller, October 5, 2000

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Enigma (Mass Market Paperback)

In his terrific speculative thriller, Fatherland, Robert Harris plopped us down in the middle of an alternate reality where Nazi Germany had won a stalemate with the United States and Hitler was about to celebrate his 75th birthday in 1964. The book was plausible and very exciting, but best of all it confronted readers with the similarity between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and implicitly asked why the west fought one and aided the other. Now, in Enigma, he shows that he can work equally effectively against the backdrop of actual events and still broach big ideas.

It's February, 1943 and Tom Jericho, a brilliant young Cambridge mathematician and protégé of Alan Turing, has already suffered one nervous breakdown under the pressure of working to break secret Nazi codes. Now he's summoned back to Bletchley Park because the U-boat code, known as Shark, which was previously decrypted due to an epiphany of his, has suddenly been changed just as an enormous supply convoy from America is setting out for Britain. Despite his delicate mental state, it's felt that he'll be valuable just for his totemic value and to reassure the higher-ups that all the best men are working on the problem.

Complicating matters is the disappearance of Jericho's ex-girlfriend, Claire Romilly, who it appears may have tipped off the Germans that their codes had been cracked. At any rate, some must have betrayed this vital secret, and, even as the supply convoy sails towards one of the biggest U-boat wolfpacks ever assembled, Jericho sets out to discover who the traitor is and where Claire has disappeared too.

The author too manages a difficult feat as he balances the mystery plot with healthy dollops of WWII history and cryptographic technique. Jericho's quest for Claire is exciting enough, but it's the details about the Enigma machines, which produced what the Nazis believed to be an unbreakable codes, and the British success in breaking them anyway, which really make for fascinating reading. Then, as if that weren't enough, when Harris introduces the reason that someone at Bletchley would assist the Nazis, he returns to some of the troubling moral and geopolitical questions that he first raised in Fatherland. It all makes for a thoughtful thriller that entertains, enlightens and provokes the reader.

GRADE : A-

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Communicates the Challenges, Captures the Thrill, October 22, 2001

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Enigma (Mass Market Paperback)

For captivating true life signals intelligence there are several books one can go to, including those by James Bamford on the American system (Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets) but for really getting into the enormity of the challenges and the thrill of the individual code-breakers when they succeeded, this is the book I recommend.

It completely ignores the enormous contributions made by the Poles (who gave the English two Enigma machines at the beginning of the war) as well as the heroic deeds of Tommy Brown (youngest George Medal winner at 16, survived with code materials taken from a sinking German ship), but I have found no better novel to communicate the absolute goose-bump emotional roller-coaster that the Bletchley Park gang experienced.

If anything, this novel convey a human side to code-breaking that offsets the modern-day obsession with massive computers.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book!, December 3, 2000

By 

Robert Steele "Culture vulture" (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enigma (Mass Market Paperback)

Robert Harris has done it again, after the triumph of Fatherland he has written another masterpiece thriller about the British codebreakers during The Battle of the Atlantic. Harris's hero Tom Jericho is a great mathematician and codebreaker at Bletchley Park who is out of the game due to a nervous breakdown, but is called back to Bletchley Park when the Allies find out that the Germans have changed their codes all of a sudden. The reason Jericho is called back is that since he broke the Germans's code last time, his superiors think he can do it again, but there is another element that puzzles Jericho: The girl he was having a relationship with, Claire Rommily, has stolen some cryptograms and disappeared into thin air! Suddenly the Forign Office begin an investigation on her, is there a spy in Bletchley Park? Jericho (with the help of Claire's housemate Hester Wallace) intends to find out just that. It would be a crime for me to give away any more. One of the things I loved the best in this book is Tom Jericho's character, he is a normal human being. Not Superman (as some of my favourite authors tend to do, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum etc.). He is not particularly good looking(although I hear that Dougray Scott has been cast as him), suave or strong. I believe that with this book, Harris has proved himself to be the succesor to John LeCarre in passing on moral messages without actually writing them out loud! Please continue to delight us Mr. Harris!