‘[A] taut and finely crafted factual thriller, reminiscent in density and pace of John le Carré… a feat
– OBSERVER on THE RATLINE
of exhilarating storytelling – gripping, gratifying and morally robust.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sands is Professor of Public Understanding of Law at UCL, visiting professor at Harvard Law School and a practising barrister at 11 KBW. He is the author of Lawless World, Torture Team, East West Street (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction) and Sunday Times bestsellers The Ratline and The Last Colony. He has served as President of English PEN and a member of the board of the Hay Festival.
He is in conversation with Sam Knights KC.
DEAR READER,
It is my great happiness to share my next book, 38 Londres Street. This is perhaps my most ambitious writing project yet, and maybe the one that is closest to my heart. The journey has been unexpected, uncovering connections between characters in the book and my own family that I could not have imagined.
This book has been a decade in the making. Back in 2015, I interviewed the Spanish judge who issued the warrant for the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998. Many forget that the indictment in those proceedings (in which I would become involved) was for crimes against humanity and genocide, which casts the book as a very direct sequel to East West Street. My interview with the judge had in fact been prompted by a letter I came across in the archive of the Wächter family – the key protagonist in The Ratline. It introduced me to a Nazi named Walther Rauff, notorious for his role in operating the mobile gas vans used to exterminate hundreds of thousands of people in the early 1940s.
I became curious about Rauff and learned that he fled on the ratline to Chile to become the manager of a king crab cannery in Punta Arenas. He was well known in that town and even features in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia, something I missed when I read the book decades ago, as a student. I came to learn that Rauff and Pinochet knew each other, and something told me – a litigator’s hunch, perhaps – that there was something more to uncover.
There was, for fact is indeed stranger than fiction. In a journey that could not be more relevant to our troubled times, I encountered the reality of impunity and its legacies.
I cannot thank you enough for your interest in this book. Please know you can count on my fullest support in bringing it to readers.
With respect and warm good wishes to you all!
This event is a QnA style event so there will be an opportunity for the audience to ask questions.