Munichs

June 1, 2024

Peace, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, offers a new work centered on a 1958 plane crash that killed 23 passengers, including eight players and three officials on the Manchester United soccer team. Peace explores the traumatizing event and its impact on Britain, the city of Manchester, the team, and beyond. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from August 19, 2024
Peace (the Red Riding Quartet) scores with a deeply moving account—­based on a true story—of a British sports team overcoming a deadly accident. On Feb. 6, 1958, a London-bound flight transporting the Manchester United football club crashes on takeoff at Munich Airport, killing eight members of the talented young squad. The injured are rushed to a local hospital. Assistant manager Jimmy Murphy flies to Munich to visit the survivors and returns home with two teammates who miraculously survived the crash without serious injuries. The days that follow are filled with official inquiries, emergency surgeries, bedside vigils, and funerals, but the heart of the story is Jimmy’s attempt to rebuild the team in time for the FA Cup final. Peace renders Jimmy’s campaign with rich dialogue, as in veteran player Ernie Taylor’s response to Jimmy’s attempt to coax him out of retirement: “I’m very sorry about everything that has happened to you like, you know, with the crash like, and I know you’re desperate, and I still appreciate you asking us like, but I just don’t think it would work, it wouldn’t be right like.” Bringing his large cast of characters—the players, their families, the air crew, the investigators, and the hospital staff—to vivid life, Peace captures all the conflicting emotions of people trying to rally in the wake of a senseless tragedy. Readers should pounce.

September 1, 2024
A storied soccer team struggles to recover from tragedy. On February 6, 1958, a plane carrying Manchester United soccer team players and staff crashed shortly after takeoff from Munich, Germany. The disaster killed eight players, three staffers, eight journalists, and one of the pilots, most instantly. This historical novel, one of a series by Peace focused on British soccer (Red or Dead, 2014, etc.), explores the lives of the nine players who survived, as well as coach Matt Busby, who'd led "Busby's Babes" to glory in previous seasons. As the title suggests, each survivor has a different recovery and relationship to trauma--a couple of players were able to return to the pitch in short order, others (and Busby) needed weeks to recover, and others were unwilling or unable to play ever again. Peace takes a roving-camera approach, shifting from hospital wards to the Man U front office to funerals to matches to hearings over who was at fault for the crash. (Investigators concluded that the plane's wings weren't de-iced before takeoff.) For fans of the game--and those with long memories of the disaster--Peace's comprehensive fictionalization of events has obvious appeal. But most of the characters feel undifferentiated from one another, aside from Busby, whose long recovery and leadership role make for an engrossing subplot, and Liam "Billy" Whelan, an outlier as an Irishman. Peace's effort to give every victim his due feels padded, a sense that's exacerbated by the habitually recursive, run-on prose ("the hour was late, so very late, and the night so cold, so wet, so very cold and wet..."). Peace is aiming for melancholy, but too often the story is just drowsy. A baggy tribute to a devastating moment.

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