The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick

Dick’s novel is considered to be the first exemplar of the alternate history novel.  It’s 1962 and Germany and Japan have won World War II largely because Roosevelt was assassinated early in his first term and John Nance Gardner has proven to be a disastrous president followed by an isolationist Democrat.  Japan destroys the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and Germany invades Great Britain.  The USA is divided into three parts.  Japan controls the Pacific States with help from co-opted Americans.  The Rocky Mountain States remain somewhat free and German controls a puppet US state in the east.  The rest of world is largely divided between German, Japan and Italy.  Canada, Sweden and Finland somehow remain free.  Slavery is legal. Sub-Saharan Africa had been essentially depopulated by German racial and “medical” experimentation.  TV is almost non-existent.  Bob Hope tell Nazi jokes on the radio from Canada.  Martin Bormann is Reichskanzler.  Hitler is out of power, old and senile from syphilis.  The intertwined cast of characters attempt to survive in the former US.  Frank Frink is a Jew in disguise who works for a Japanese company manufacturing fake antiques such as Colt revolvers for a Japanese market hungry for classic American items.  Many are sold through antiques dealer Robert Childan who is desperately trying to impress his largely Japanese clientele. Frink’s ex-wife Juliana is a Judo instructor in Colorado who takes up with Joe Cinnadella an Italian truck driver who claims to have killed many Nazis as part of the Italian Resistance.  Mr. Tagomi is supposedly the trade representative from the “Home Islands” but appears to have more power when a strange Swedish man named Baynes shows up for an arranged meeting with an elderly Japanese man from the Home Islands.  Most of the characters routinely consult the I Ching before making decisions and passages from the “Oracle” feature prominently in the novel.   Cracks in the system began when Borman dies and a power struggle between Goebbels, Goring and Heydrich (who survived his assassination) ensues.  Things are further strained by the appearance of a novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by an obscure writer named Hawthorne Abendsen who supposedly lives in a heavily fortified compound in Wyoming known as the “High Castle.”  Many of the characters are reading or have read the novel which itself is an alternate history in which the U.S. and Great Britain have won the war partially by coopting the Italians into turning against Germany.  The novel within the novel is the first clue that things may not be exactly as they seem.  In fact, Dick’s novel may be viewed as an extended contemplation on the nature of perception and reality.  Any more would wander into the “spoiler’ category.  Highly recommended reading.