Darkest Hour: How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink

May, 1940. Britain is at war. The horrors of blitzkrieg have seen one Western European democracy after another fall in rapid succession to Nazi boot and shell. Invasion seems mere hours away.

Just days after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill must deal with this horror--as well as a skeptical king, a party plotting against him, and an unprepared public. Pen in hand and typist-secretary at the ready, how could he change the mood and shore up the will of a nervous people?

In this gripping day-by-day, often hour-by-hour account of how a sometimes uncertain Churchill turned Britain around, the celebrated BAFTA-winning writer Anthony McCarten exposes sides of the great man never seen before. He reveals how Churchill practiced and rewrote his key speeches, from "Blood, toil, tears and sweat" to "We shall fight on the beaches"; his consideration of a peace treaty with Nazi Germany and his underappreciated role in the Dunkirk evacuation; and, above all, how twenty-five days helped make one man an icon.

Anthony McCarten is a New Zealand-born novelist, playwright, journalist, television writer and four-time Academy Award nominated filmmaker. He is best known for writing the biopics The Theory of Everything (2014), Darkest Hour (2017), Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and The Two Popes (2019), and producing motion pictures that entertain and inspire through the examination of some of history's most interesting people. He received Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Theory of Everything and The Two Popes, and won two BAFTA awards for the former. Notably, the first three of these films won consecutive Oscars in the Best Actor category (for Eddie Redmayne, Gary Oldman and Rami Malik). Bohemian Rhapsody is the second highest grossing box-office drama of all time, after Titanic. His non-fiction work, Darkest Hour, was a Number 1 Sunday Times Bestseller. He lives in London.