Killing the Pope

A gripping account of the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II from the bestselling author of ChernobylOn a warm, sunny afternoon in May 1981, more than 10,000 pilgrims from all over the world gather on St. Peter’s Square for the start of Pope John Paul’s general audience. Out of nowhere, a gunshot is heard. John Paul collapses. A gunman is apprehended.After the attempted assassination, John Paul II said that ‘one hand pulled the trigger, another guided the bullet’. But in this electrifying account of one of the most iconic events of the Cold War, historian Serhii Plokhy invites us to ask: what if there were far more than just two hands present that day? Drawing on new archival research, Plokhy accompanies the assassin as he travels across Europe in preparation for his strike, following the threads of the story into the corridors of the Kremlin and the Vatican, and through the inner circles of Turkish ultra-nationalists, KGB functionaries, Sicilian mafiosi and Catholic cardinals.Both riveting and illuminating, Killing the Pope goes right to the heart of the Cold War in its final decade – an era of extreme paranoia, in which our own age of disinformation was slowly being born – and sheds new light on one of its most troubling and enduring mysteries.

Serhii Plokhy is the author of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Pushkin House Book Prize, and the New York Times bestseller The Gates of Europe. His many acclaimed books, including The Russo-Ukrainian War, Nuclear Folly and Atoms and Ashes, have been translated into over a dozen languages. He is Professor of History at Harvard University where he also serves as Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.