Ask HN: What's your favorite book that nobody you know has heard of?

Anyone who browses HN regularly will probably enjoy the book "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones (or the accompanying TV show "The Secret War"). Jones was a physicist working for Churchill directly by the end of the war.

Everyone has heard of Bletchley park and the Manhattan project, but Jones's book covers the game of genuinely deadly cat and mouse that was played throughout WW2 as each side learned and adapted to eachothers scientific intelligence. Radar, Sonar (ASDIC at the time), Magnetic mines, etc.

Its easy to think of it as an intellectual game of chess but it is telling that when the Allies bombed Peenemunde (Nazi area 51) they flew straight over the laboratories to bomb the houses of the scientists.

The TV adaptation is brilliant - thoughtful documentary production, not dumbed down, and most of the people were still alive when it was filmed.

https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8

Edit: for anyone reading the book look out for mentions of any members of the Cambridge five - Jones was shunned after the war so he is perhaps overly kind to Kim Philby. The same system that allowed the KGB to run wild wouldn't recruit Jones into intelligence work for being of the wrong sort (apparently - according Peter Wright)

Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean by Morten Stroksnes

"Consilience" E.O. Wilson (Nobel Laureate)

Small book, small words, short sentences; will kick your butt.

Haruki Murakami - The elephant vanishes

As I searched for the author after reading this book by chance it seemed to me that he is quite famous - but nobody around me has ever heard of him. The book I recommend is a collection of short stories, most rooted in reality with a hint(or sometimes a container) of surreal.