The final week of World War II unfolded like a political thriller—with millions of lives hanging in the balance.

By early August 1945, Japan had been chased across the Pacific, hemmed in on the Asian mainland, and isolated by the fall of Nazi Germany. But it did not surrender. Even after an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, Japan held on – and seemed prepared to fight to the last man. For Japan to raise the white flag, it would take another atomic blast, a Soviet attack, and a failed coup by Japanese militarists. Carefully researched history that unfolds like a political thriller, Eight Days in August chronicles the dramatic series of events that led to the end of World War II with Japan.

The story opens on August 8, 1945, with Japan still reeling two days after Hiroshima. On the island of Tinian, American B-29 Superfortress Bockscar flies a practice run for dropping a second atomic bomb. In Moscow, the Soviet foreign minister hands the Japanese ambassador a declaration of war. The next day, setting in motion a week of high-stakes diplomacy and tense debate, a nuclear fireball incinerates Nagasaki, and the Red Army rolls into Japanese-held Manchuria in northeastern China.

In Washington, Truman and his cabinet debate softening the demand for unconditional surrender and allowing the Japanese emperor to remain. Planning continues for the invasion of Japan, an operation expected to cost hundreds of thousands of American and millions of Japanese casualties. Officials warily watch the Soviets in Manchuria, knowing that the deeper the Red Army drives, the graver the threat to the postwar world. The clock is ticking. The U.S. sends Japan a note proposing a way out for the emperor.

In Tokyo, the war cabinet is split between surrender and war to the death. Emperor Hirohito comes to favor peace, but a group of radical militarists demands to fight on, even if it means violating the godlike emperor’s will and toppling the government, even if it means destroying Japan. The coup fails, a wave of suicides follows, and on August 15, the emperor’s surrender message is broadcast to a people who have never before heard their leader’s voice.

Eight Days in August is a day-by-day – at times minute-by-minute – narrative of how Japan finally surrendered. While covering the sweep of grand events – the Manhattan Project, the causes and course of World War II in the Pacific, the origins of the Cold War in Asia – the book never loses sight of the individuals caught up in the war’s last gasp: the victims of Nagasaki, the crew who dropped the bomb, the Japanese general caught between loyalty to the emperor and his sense of military honor. Millions of lives hung in the balance, and Eight Days in August captures all the tension and drama of this world-defining moment.