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In The Dead, Award-winning author Christian Kracht presents a historical novel of international conspiracy, cinematic intrigue, and murder set before World War II, in the early years of the Axis powers' rise to tyranny.In The Dead, the follow-up to his acclaimed novel Imperium (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year) , Christian Kracht mines the feverish film culture of the 1930s to produce a Gothic tale of global conspiracy, personal loss, and historical entanglements large and small. In Berlin, Germany, in the early 1930s, the acclaimed Swiss film director Emil Ngeli receives the assignment of a lifetime: travel to Japan and make a film to establish the dominance of Adolf Hitler's Nazi empire once and for all. But his handlers are unaware that Ngeli has colluded with the Jewish film critics to pursue an alternative objective -- to create a monumental, modernist, allegorical spectacle to warn the world of the horror to come.