In May 1942, the high-ranking Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed “The Butcher of Prague”, was attacked in Prague by Czechoslovak resistance agents in an assassination operation called Anthropoid. The author describes how he became obsessed with this event, reading everything that could be even tangentially related to anything or anyone who had even the faintest connection to it — eventually leading him to write this book.

The book, HHhH, is not your typical historical novel, let alone a typical piece of historical fiction. It’s as much a study of the author’s relationship with historical writing as it is a recounting of the events. Binet makes it very clear that he will not invent characters, their thoughts, dialogue, or motives if he does not have any evidence for them. The chapters are short (the shortest one is just one line!) and a chapter that describes the historical events is often followed by the author’s commentary, like musings about missing or contradictory sources, or him comparing his style to some other authors who have written about the same topic. While it may sound confusing, and I admit I was sceptical at first too, the unusual structure actually works very well, and the author manages to keep everything coherent.

Given the subject matter, you could slap a whole bunch of trigger warnings on this book. Most notably, there are some rather detailed and disturbing descriptions of the mass murders, like at the Babyn Yar ravine in Ukraine. There isn’t really a happy ending either: Nazis basically just murdered almost everyone who had ever crossed paths with the resistance operatives, Jozef Gabฤรญk and Jan Kubiลก, along with their families, but that’s the problem with history.

I found this book thanks to The StoryGraph Reads the World 2026 challenge. The idea is to read a book by an author from a certain country, such as France, set in that particular country, to expand your literary horizons. I haven’t tried this challenge before, but a while back I had an epiphany that I could just feed my list of read books to an AI and ask it to suggest books I might like, matching the challenge countries.

If you’ve been paying attention, you can see where the AI just hallucinated and outright failed me: HHhH is not set in France. However, I shall call that a lucky accident, as I did enjoy reading this one anyway. The book also won a French literary prize for best debut novel when it came out in 2010, so apparently I’m not the only one.