The Book of Kings is an epic novel that begins in the years shortly before
World War II and leads up to the present day. While Europe drifts toward Nazism, four students
share an apartment on the rue de Fleurus in Paris. Thackara brilliantly forges the stories of these
four men whose lives mirror the larger picture.

The title alludes to God's prophetic warning to Samuel about the rise of man-made kings. James
Thackara, as John Walsh wrote in the New Yorker, "watches Hitler's rise from a dozen different
perspectives: at Nuremberg rallies; as reported in dinner-table gossip; in close-up appearances at
Hindenburg's side; in letters and rumors of war; in the gradually thickening atmosphere of fright and
inevitability."

A work of extraordinary vision and range, The Book of Kings magnificently fuses myth and the
inexorable events of history.

James Thackara was born in Los Angeles in 1944 to parents descended from a Zurich cotton merchant in Shanghai and General William Tecumseh Sherman. He was educated in Buenos Aires, Provence, California, Rome, Switzerland and New England, graduating from Harvard in 1967, where he studied under Peter Taylor, Fredric Jameson, and Joseph frank. Since then, he has lived in London. He is the author of two other novels, America's Children and Ahab's Daughter.

Earphones Awards recipient Robert Whitfield was born in England and worked for the BBC for ten years as a radio news announcer and also worked as a narrator for the Royal National Institute for the Blind in London. In addition to narrating for Blackstone Audiobooks, he involves himself in numerous stage-acting projects in the United States and Europe.