The incredible true story of the greatest illusionist of modern times and the man who altered the course of the second world war.

Soon to be a major film starring Benedict Cumberbatch

‘A richly entertaining read’ SUNDAY TIMES

Jasper Maskelyne was a world famous magician and illusionist in the 1930s. When war broke out, he volunteered his services to the British Army and was sent to Egypt when the desert war began.

Here, he used his unique skills to save the vital port of Alexandria from German bombers and to ‘hide’ the Suez Canal from them. He invented all sorts of camouflage methods to make trucks look like tanks and vice versa. On Malta he developed ‘the world’s first portable holes’: fake bomb craters used to fool the Germans into thinking they had hit their targets.

His war culminated in the brilliant deception plan that helped win the Battle of El Alamein: the creation of an entire dummy army in the middle of the desert.