Saving Freud

Astonishing... In the American journalist Andrew Nagorski this tale has found its ideal narrator
SEBASTIAN FAULKS, Sunday Times

[A] thrilling book, as edge-of-your-seat gripping as any heist movie
Kathryn Hughes, Guardian Book of the Day

A gripping masterpiece
BRETT KAHR, Freud Museum London


March 1938: German soldiers are massing on the Austrian border, on the cusp of fulfilling Hitlers dream of absorbing the country into the Third Reich. Many Jews make frantic plans to flee to safety. But one of the most famous men in the world, unable to contemplate leaving his beloved Vienna, is not among them. His name is Sigmund Freud.

Saving Freud is the story of a great mans life, and of the extraordinary people who managed to prolong it, by convincing him to escape to London: the Welsh physician who brought psychoanalysis to Britain; Napoleons great-grandniece; an American ambassador; Freuds devoted daughter, Anna; and the doctor who risked his own life by staying at Freuds side.

In examining the histories of both Freud and his closest circle, Andrew Nagorski brilliantly evokes the story of Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century. This is a tale of a great city, a collapsing empire, a rising terror -and of a man who would change the way we think.