David Peace's Munich Review – A Masterful Portrait of a Football Tragedy

An electrifying account of how the Munich air disaster changed football and Britain forever

Why the plural? There is only one Munich in David Peace’s new novel, and we see very little of it: the muddy runway where British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on February 6, 1958; the hotel room where two survivors spent their first night of dismay; the hospital where their fellow passengers recovered – or not. This is surely the story of an accident, of a time, of a team: the plane crash that killed 23 of the 44 passengers, including eight Manchester United players, three staff members and eight journalists.

But Peace’s reasoning becomes clear over the hundreds of pages of this relentless, electrifying and poignant novel. The Munich air disaster, which played such a significant role in the development of the football club and had such a profound impact on the city, the north of England, the sporting community and the country as a whole, might not have happened if the take-off had been cancelled. And what would the world be like then?