V2 is the compelling story of the rockets used by Germany to bomb Britain near the end of the war in retaliation for the sustained bombing by the RAF. Told from both sides, we follow Graf the engineer who helped develop the bombs fir the Nazis and Kay, an English WAAF officer who's job it was to calculate the launch sites as soon as a rocket was fired. Told against the backdrop of war time Europe, with all the associated tensions, suspicions and deprivation both Kay and Graf are depicted sympathetically as they both, in their own way,seek to work towards the greater good, even in the midst of war.
Well researched and with enough detail to be convincing ,V2 is a welcome addition to Robert Harris's body of work.

Robert Harris is always a fantastic, immersive storyteller who does impeccable research and this was no exception. Short, pithy, fascinating and doubly interesting to me as Claus von Braun, who developed the V2 also shows up to help the US space mission in The Right Stuff, which I’m watching on TV currently.

I've often picked up books by Robert Harris and wondered how he's going to make a story out of this

Fear not - he's got this spot on.  A great storyline, strong and realistic characters and just a damn good read

Nothing else needs to be said - just read the book

An enthralling historical thriller set towards the end of World War Two as V2 rockets reign terror on London. Beautifully researched and featuring real characters such as Von Braun who went on to mastermind the USAs space race, it is a quick paced and involving novel. I am a huge fan of Robert Harris and delighted to receive this an an arc from the publisher and netgalley.

I’ve read a number of Robert Harris’s books and they are always well researched and interesting. My only criticism is that it is sometimes difficult to tell fact from fiction- but maybe that’s the sign of a good author. The same is certainly the case in this novel which is about the Nazis‘ development of the V2 rocket bombs and the allies’ attempts to stop them targeting London.
Coming from a family who love anything to do with Space and the  Moon Landings as well as having a son who has spent 2 Summers during his PHD working for NASA, I’d heard of the German scientist Von Braun and his part in the American Space race. However when reading Robert Harris’s book I kept checking to find out if his hero Dr Graf existed and if some of the things written about Von Braun were true!
I always found it slightly strange that the US would employ Nazi scientists with no qualms just because they wanted the technological advances after the War, particularly after the destruction these scientists had instigated by developing the rockets.
In this book Robert Harris gives Graf a conscience- he wants to develop space rockets but he doesn’t like creating bombs. I would be surprised if Von Braun felt this way but it seems he had a long and productive life in the US after the War.
The story is told from Graf’s point of view and that of Kay, an English officer who is one of the women who are tasked with tracking the trajectories of the V2s using algebraic methods.
All in all this was a great read and as in other books by this author, I learnt a lot that I didn’t know about the subject.
I whizzed through this in less than 2 days which shows how entertaining it was!
Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for my arc in exchange for an honest review.

Robert Harris is a reliably good author, and this book certainly didn't disappoint.  A gripping, engrossing thriller, and a subject I knew very little about made for a compelling read.  I would thoroughly recommend this book.

V2 is an excellent historical novel of WW2. V2 rockets caused immeasurable damage to London killing so many people and destroying so much property that over half a million  London citizens were made homeless. Here we have the story from both sides of the channel.The scientists who originally invented the rockets as a means of space travel hoping one day to reach the moon until the evil Nazi regime turned them into methods of mass destruction, and the British military desperate to stop the rockets.
The characters are all very well developed, and although fictional it is heartening to know there were real heroes during these dark times. WAAF officer Kate Canton Walsh has personally experienced the destructive power of two of these rockets, she works with other WAAF personnel pouring over photographs taken by the RAF at great risk to try discover the launching sites of the rockets so they can be destroyed. Rudi Graf is the German scientist forced to relinquish his dreams and work for the Nazi’s or face certain death.
A well constructed story that is thoroughly entertaining and enjoyable, I felt well educated at the end of the book without even realising it, if only history had been told like this in school!
My thanks to net galley and publisher for the opportunity to review this book honestly.

Thanks to Netgalley for an advance copy of this book. This review is my own opinion.
I loved this book. I wasn't sure of it when I started, war time stories are not usually my thing, but the author's skill in story telling soon gripped me. It is set in the final period of the war, Winter 1942, the period when the German's developed the deadly V2 rocket. 
The story is told from the point of view of Kay who after an affair with a high ranking official joins a unit of women sent to the Netherlands to try to locate the base the rockets are fired from. 
The work is top secret and surprisingly is based on mathematical theory. 
We hear the voice of the inventor of the rocket with whom surprisingly one is in sympathy. 
There is a human side to the story, relationships form. There is description of the cruelty of the Nazis towards the local people. There is distrust and honour and some romance too. 
Throughout the story though the wartime descriptions bring the events to life. 
Robert Harris wrote this book during the lockdown period in mid 2020. I found it well researched and fascinating and learned much about this period of the war and about the V2 itself. 
It's an adventure story, it's a spy story and it's a romance. It has it all.

Rudi Graf had a dream to send a rocket to the moon but has ended up making a weapon of mass destruction.  Kay has been plucked from university to aid the RAF in destroying the rockets.  Kay is posted to Belgium to help plot the course of the V2 rockets and Graf seems to be bent on sabotage.  Meanwhile the Nazi machine is throwing everything at one last chance to avoid defeat.
Generally I enjoy Harris' books but I found this one a little too predictable.  There's the obligatory conscience and the obligatory bit of perfunctory sex  but I never felt that the story took flight - so to speak

Harris gives factual backdrop to his story, as the two main characters are drawn nearer together by a series of events related the V2 rockets and their launch. 'V2' is a proper page turner, skilfully mixing the real and fictional characters into the plot. Not a 'what if' novel, more a fascinating, and at times harrowing, look into one part of the Second World War.

Robert Harris excels at WW2 thrillers and 'V2' is up there with 'Fatherland' and 'Enigma', a top notch historical thriller.

Full of fascinating historical details and clearly very well researched. I recommended it to my uncle who is a maths teacher as well as a Robert Harris fan. I'll recommend it to customers, but it's definitely not his best work. It seemed like somewhere along the way someone forgot to add a story - the characters were interesting but there was little development, there was no momentum, there was no climax/denouement. It's a shame, but I'm sure I'll still always read his novels.

V2 by Robert Harris

It is November 1944 and V2 rockets rain down on London. They arrive silently, no-one knows where they will hit but when they do the devastation is sudden, terrifying and deadly. Germany is in retreat but now every resource they have, whether slave or fuel, is being put into the production of these rockets, which are then launched from moving sites in occupied Holland on the cities of London and Antwerp. Rudi Graf is a leading German rocket engineer. His dream had been to design and propel rockets to the Moon but his research was hijacked when Hitler came to power. Now he launches rockets to kill civilians, urged on by his Nazi commanders and propagandists. In this cold, bleak seaside town, Rudi becomes increasingly disillusioned.

Kay Calton-Walsh is a young intelligence officer in the WAAF. It is her job to try and detect launch sites from aerial photographs. She’s good at her job and she has also experienced herself the horrors of a V2 strike. When she gets the chance to do even more for the war effort she leaps at it. She joins a team of WAAFs in Belgium. Their task is to observe launches and calculate their origin. The mathematics is difficult, incredibly pressured and the equations must be done quickly. It’s impossible to forget that behind the numbers, lives are at stake and that every second counts.

Robert Harris is one of my very favourite authors. His books vary enormously – ancient Rome, the Vatican conclave, World War 2, an alternate future, 19th century France, and so on – but they are all expertly constructed, ingenious thrillers. The tension and drama can be found in strangely quiet moments, within enormously intelligent individuals who must face a significant challenge, whether that’s an engineer trying to predict the eruption of Vesuvius in Pompeii or a civil servant’s attempts to broker his own deal at Munich in 1939. These are places with secrets, where much can be underhand, and the stakes are enormous. In Rudi Graf we have another of these figures and he is a fascinating man who has an uneasy relationship with the rocket that he has created as well as with the people around him. He is very alone.

This is a novel in which one side faces off against another, where every act has a consequence. There are some fantastic, coldly horrifying sequences in which we follow a rocket through those four minutes from launch to target. The author takes us outside of the story to tell us how many people each rocket injures and kills. The facts are engrossing but they’re made real by the experiences of Kay Calton-Walsh. She is a busy young woman, liberated by war into being useful, with a role that peace would deny her. She also loves unwisely. But her focus is on stopping these rockets. I loved the chapters set in Belgium. How strange it must have been for the locals to have one army replaced by another in their town. There is tension in the novel from the rockets but it also comes from the relationship between the WAAFs and the local villagers.

V2 is a relatively short novel and we’re told it was written quickly through lockdown. It does have the feel of a novel written with urgency. It is true I would have liked it to have been longer. I would have liked more but what there is, is fantastic. The characterisation is spot on and the locations are richly evoked, especially the launch sites, which were lethal, manned by expendable, tired men, driven on by absurd targets who often became the victims of their own rockets. I’m fascinated by this subject – my grandfather went behind enemy lines to spy on V2 rocket production – and Robert Harris is the perfect writer to convey the dread and terror of these weapons while also respecting the science behind them. It’s an extremely tense thriller – rockets are launched time after time, day after day. They must be stopped.

I can’t wait for the next Robert Harris novel. It could be about anything. It might surprise me as much as The Second Sleep did. Whatever it is, I know I’ll be enthralled. His novel Pompeii remains my favourite historical novel. If you haven’t read it, read it!

Other reviews
An Officer and a Spy
Dictator
Conclave
Munich
The Second Sleep

A thrilling dual narrative of life and death! A great mixture of fact and fiction that really puts you in the moment. I'm going to go back and read more of Harris' wartime novels.

It's November 1944--Willi Graf, a German rocket engineer, is launching Nazi Germany's V2 rockets at London from Occupied Holland. Kay Connolly, once an actress, now a young English Intelligence officer, ships out for Belgium to locate the launch sites and neutralize the threat. But when rumors of a defector circulate through the German ranks, Graf becomes a suspect. Unknown to each other, Graf and Connolly find themselves on opposite sides of the hunt for the saboteur.

This novel is set over a few days in 1944. Robert Harris as blended real life history with fiction to make agreat read,

Thanks to netgalley and Robert Harris for sending me =n ARC of this book

Once again Robert Harris has taken known historical events and turned them into a compelling story. In this instance he's writing about the German V2 programme in the final years of WW2 and the British efforts to destroy the launch sites. I knew nothing about the V2 programme, which involved long range missiles fired at London from the Dutch coast. I didn't even realise that the German had bombs that weren't dropped from planes. So I really enjoyed learning about this part of history as well as the story itself.

As in Munich, Harris alternates chapters between a German and a British character. Dr Rudi Graf is a (fictional) engineer on the V2 project, working alongside many real life individuals. On the other side is Kay Caton-Walsh, working in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and part of the team who are using radar to try to locate the V2 firing sites. I particularly liked Kay's chapters which are tenser and more cinematic - the German chapters included a lot of background information about the V2 and Rudi was a less interesting character.

The book is both immaculately researched and extremely readable. While it's missing the x factor that puts a book into the "can't put it down" category, it's still a fascinating read.

Factual information and storytelling not quite seamlessly satisfying

I have been utterly enthralled by some of Harris’ books, (The Cicero Trilogy, An Officer and A Spy, Fatherland, Enigma) but am also, at times less gripped and engaged. Sadly, this was one of the latter kind.

The research into the technical details of construction of the V2 and rocket programme, and the details of the race against time work to triangulate where the V2s were being fired from unfortunately did not manage to engage me in a suspenseful way. Some other books by Harris, whilst knowing the outcomes, have been extremely suspenseful. I think part of the problem with this one is that somehow the invented characters did not quite flesh out, and some of the dialogue, whilst seeking to indicate character type – notably the darling laden Barbara, seemed drawn from cliché.

History that few knew about encapsulated in a modern thriller. A true story of the women who put their live on the line in World War Two. A super read

This was my first Robert Harris book and I'm impressed! 
I loved the way he entwined fiction and history together to make a really well written story.
Completely engaging and if this book is his standard of writing I will definitely have to read more of his books!

I read Fatherland when it came out and loved it, but inexplicably have not read any other books by Robert Harris until I got this through Netgalley. What a fascinating book - the cliche "it brings history to life" is over-used, but I'm going to use it again because he really does. 
As the Author's Note says, the book focuses on the launch of V2 rockets against London in November 1944. The day-to-day activities concentrate especially on two characters - Kay Caton-Walsh, a WAAF trying to find out where the V2 rockets are launched and Dr Rudi Graf, a German scientist working on the rockets themselves. You really find yourself getting involved with the characters and what happens to them and how things play out. The historical details are wonderfully clear and so interesting. There are flashbacks to the development of the rockets in Germany and the details of casualties in London are simply stated, making it so poignant. Anyone with an interest in WW2 and also in rockets and space travel will enjoy this tightly-written intelligent book.  I read it in 2 days, so engrossed was I.

Although a piece of fiction the book did not disappoint, it created a real sense of atmosphere and linked the tragic history with reality. 

The novel is set in two places, on the coast of The Netherlands, around Scheveningen and in London. The events in the two places are synchronous. Taking place during November 1944.

There are two key characters: Rudi Graf, a German engineer and Kay Caton-Walsh, a WAAF officer. As the narrative of the story unfolds, aspects of their lives become enmeshed. 

I won't go into detail for fear of spoiling the story. Suffice to say that Robert Harris manages to successfully marry up real historical events within an entertaining and credible piece of fictional writing. 

The final pages make interesting although depressing reading. 

I give my thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK (Cornerstone) for a copy in exchange for this review.