Tunnel 29

In the summer of 1962, Joachim Rudolph — a young man who had already escaped East Berlin himself — led a group of students digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall to rescue those left behind. Drawing on the BBC podcast of the same name, Helena Merriman reconstructs the operation in close, novelistic detail: the diggers working by candlelight beneath the death strip, a red-haired courier carrying messages between East and West, and an American television crew secretly filming the rescue for what became one of the first reality documentaries.

The tunnel's builders did not know their operation had been infiltrated by a Stasi informant, and Merriman follows the escape as it hangs in the balance between the diggers, the watching cameras, and the East German secret police working to stop them. Twenty-nine people ultimately made it through the tunnel to the West.

Tunnel 29 won Waterstones Paperback of the Year and was named a Book of the Year by The Economist; a television adaptation is in development.