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Episode details

World Service,07 Mar 2026,58 mins

Laurent Binet - HHhH

World Book Club

Available for over a year

Harriett Gilbert welcomes the French author Laurent Binet to the World Book Club studio to answer your questions about his acclaimed novel HHhH. The book tells the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, and the daring mission carried out by Czech resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied Prague. At the same time, Binet places himself into the narrative, obsessively questioning how history should be told, where fact ends and fiction begins, and whether a writer ever has the right to blur that line. Recorded in front of a live audience at The American Library in Paris, Laurent will be answering your questions about blending history and fiction without betraying the truth, why he chose to make himself writing part of the story itself, and how storytelling is an attempt to confront, or make sense of, the darkest moments in history.

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