Book review: The Afrika Reich by Guy Saville

This is the bleak and brutal world conjured up in Guy Saville’s scorching debut novel, a terrifying account of the way things might have been if the Brits had capitulated at Dunkirk in 1940.

His alternate history – in which Nazi Africa has become a killing ground of slave labour camps and wholesale ethnic slaughter – is the stuff of nightmares.

The Afrika Reich is essentially an all-action, explosive thriller but it weaves real-life figures and some scarily convincing fiction into a plot based on authentic Third Reich plans for the ‘Dark Continent.’

Using genuine Nazi war aims, Saville imagines Hitler grabbing back the colonies lost to Germany under the Versailles Treaty after the First World War, a new empire run from Germania (formerly Berlin) and the SS in charge of policing Africa.

When this dark and dystopian world is coupled with a cast of credible characters, Machiavellian plot twists, cinematic action scenes and pulsating suspense, the story becomes irresistible...

Former mercenary soldier Burton Cole is still haunted by the disappearance of his beloved mother during his early years growing up as Burton Kohl in Togoland, a German protectorate in West Africa.