On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He had the main conspirators brutally strung up on meat hooks. Among the executed was Axel von Gottberg, a German Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who returned home in 1934, to the dismay of his Oxford friends, particularly Elya Mendel.

Sixty years later, Elya, now a distinguished professor, leaves behind a collection of papers and letters to a former student, Conrad Senior, and asks him to find out the truth about Axel, whom he had condemned as a Nazi sympathizer. But the more Conrad tries to uncover the truth, the more complex he finds the relationship between the two friends, especially in their involvement with two beautiful English cousins. As Conrad investigates obsessively, his own life comes apart. Weaving darkly through these complex stories is an infamous film of Axel's execution; a film which Conrad is desperate to find, for reasons he can barely understand himself.

Wonderfully written--and based on true events--The Song Before It Is Sung is a novel of profound and sensitive insight into the human condition, spanning Oxford in the 1930s, prewar Prussia, and contemporary Britain and surpassing all of Cartwright's previous works in its scope and ambition.

From the Booker Prize nominee and Whitbread Prize winner, a sweeping novel about the nature of human freedom and human passion that received glowing praise in hardcover.

On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. He found the main conspirators and had them hanged from meat hooks. Axel, Count von Gottberg, was one of those hanged by Hitler. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior, a former student of one of Axel’s most trusted friends, is left some of his personal papers and is immediately drawn into a web of jealousy, passion, and betrayal. The more he scrambles to uncover the truth, the more complex he finds the relationship between the two friends.

Wonderfully written—and based on true events—The Song Before It is Sung is a novel of profound and sensitive insight into the human condition, surpassing all of Cartwright’s previous works in its scope and ambition.

Justin Cartwright is the author of In Every Face I Meet, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Leading the Cheers, which won the Whitbread, The Promise of Happiness, which won the Hawthornden Prize, and White Lightning, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread. He was born in South Africa, and now lives in London.