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The Deep Silence
by Douglas ReemanThis is a romping yarn from Douglas Reeman, also author of the bestselling Bolitho adventures, when writing under his pen name Alexander Kent.HMS Temeraire: latest and most advanced of Britain's nuclear submarines. When Temraire's trials are cut short and she is ordered to the Far East to reinforce the fleet against a threat from Red China, her captain, David Jermain, knows that this is no routine exercise in flag-waving. And once in Asian waters, he and his submarine find themselves involved in a hidden undeclared conflict beneath the sea. While the politicians haggle over a situation which could hold the seeds of full-scale war, Commander Jermain must keep his faith in himself and in his new ship's potential - even when ordered to take the Temeraire to the edge of a catastrophe.
The House by the Lake: A Story Of Germany
by Thomas HardingSHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2015LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2016 A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK‘A passionate memoir.’ Neil MacGregor‘A superb portrait of twentieth century Germany seen through the prism of a house which was lived in, and lost, by five different families. A remarkable book.’ Tom Holland‘Personal and panoramic, heart-wrenching yet uplifting, this is history at its most alive.’ A.D. Miller In 2013, Thomas Harding returned to his grandmother’s house on the outskirts of Berlin which she had been forced to leave when the Nazis swept to power. What was once her ‘soul place’ now stood empty and derelict. A concrete footpath cut through the garden, marking where the Berlin Wall had stood for nearly three decades.In a bid to save the house from demolition, Thomas began to unearth the history of the five families who had lived there: a nobleman farmer, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned Nazi composer, a widow and her children and a Stasi informant. Discovering stories of domestic joy and contentment, of terrible grief and tragedy, and of a hatred handed down through the generations, a history of twentieth century Germany and the story of a nation emerged.
A Rumor Of War
by Philip CaputoThe first memoir of the Vietnam War and an all-time classic of war literature|40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION|In March 1965, Marine Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars, he returned home - physically whole but emotionally destroyed, his youthful idealism shattered.A decade later, having reported first-hand the very final hours of the war, Caputo sat down to write ‘simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them’. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time.____________________‘A singular and marvellous work – a soldier’s-eye account that tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in this hellish jungle’ The New York Times‘Unparalleled in its honesty, unapologetic in its candour and singular in its insights into the minds and hearts of men in combat, this book is as powerful to read today as the day it was published in 1977. Caputo has more than earned his place beside Sassoon, Owen, Vonnegut, and Heller’ Kevin Powers‘To call this the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. A Rumour of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist that readers asks themselves the questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? A terrifying book, it will make the strongest among us weep’ Los Angeles Times Book Review‘Caputo’s troubled, searching meditations on the love and the hate of war, on fear and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men are amongst the most eloquent I have read in modern literature’ New York Review of Books‘Superb. At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novel’ New Statesman
Please, Mister Postman
by Alan JohnsonIn July 1969, while the Rolling Stones played a free concert in Hyde Park, Alan Johnson and his young family left West London to start a new life. The Britwell Estate in Slough, apparently notorious among the locals, in fact came as a blessed relief after the tensions of Notting Hill, and the local community welcomed them with open arms.Alan had become a postman the previous year, and in order to support his growing family took on every bit of overtime he could, often working twelve-hour shifts six days a week. It was hard work, but not without its compensations – the crafty fag snatched in a country lane, the farmer’s wife offering a hearty breakfast and even the mysterious lady on Glebe Road who appeared daily, topless, at her window as the postman passed by…Please, Mister Postman paints a vivid picture of England in the 1970s, where no celebration was complete without a Party Seven of Watney’s Red Barrel, smoking was the norm rather than the exception, and Sunday lunchtime was about beer, bingo and cribbage. But as Alan’s life appears to be settling down and his career in the Union of Postal Workers begins to take off, his close-knit family is struck once again by tragedy…Moving, hilarious and unforgettable, Please, Mister Postman is another astonishing book from the award-winning author of This Boy.
1914 The Year The World Ended: The Year The World Ended
by Paul HamIn August 1914, the European powers plunged the world into a war that would kill or wound 37 million people, tear down the fabric of society, uproot ancient political systems and set the world on course for the bloodiest century in human history.On the eve of the 100th anniversary of that terrible year, Ham takes the reader on a journey into the labyrinth, to reveal the complexity, the layered motives, the flawed and disturbed minds that drove the world to war. What emerges is a clear sense of what happened and why. 'To understand the past,' Ham concludes, 'and share that understanding, is the chief role of the historian. To understand the past is to liberate ourselves from its awful shadow and steel ourselves against it happening again.'
Saladin: The Life, the Legend and the Islamic Empire
by John ManSaladin remains one of the most iconic figures of his age. As the man who united the Arabs and saved Islam from Christian crusaders in the 12th century, he is the Islamic world’s preeminent hero. Ruthless in defence of his faith, brilliant in leadership, he also possessed qualities that won admiration from his Christian foes. He knew the limits of violence, showing such tolerance and generosity that many Europeans, appalled at the brutality of their own people, saw him as the exemplar of their own knightly ideals. But Saladin is far more than a historical hero. Builder, literary patron and theologian, he is a man for all times, and a symbol of hope for an Arab world once again divided. Centuries after his death, in cities from Damascus to Cairo and beyond, to the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, Saladin continues to be an immensely potent symbol of religious and military resistance to the West. He is central to Arab memories, sensibilities and the ideal of a unified Islamic state. In this authoritative biography, historian John Man brings Saladin and his world to life in vivid detail. Charting his rise to power, his struggle to unify the warring factions of his faith, and his battles to retake Jerusalem and expel Christian influence from Arab lands, Saladin explores the life and the enduring legacy of this champion of Islam, and examines his significance for the world today.
Railways of the Great War with Michael Portillo
by Colette HooperFrom the exploits of railwaymen at the Front to the secrets of railway spies who worked behind enemy lines; the manufacture of munitions in railway workshops to the role of railways in post-war remembrance – this book explores some of the remarkable stories of the railway war. Individually, each illuminates a different aspect of the conflict. Taken together, they provide us with a fresh perspective on the First World War as a whole.The Great War was the quintessential railway war. Railways helped to precipitate this mechanized conflict: they defined how it was fought and kept the home front moving; they conveyed millions to the trenches and evacuated the huge numbers of wounded. The railways sustained a terrible war of attrition and, ultimately, bore witness to its end.In Railways of the Great War, Michael Portillo and Colette Hooper tell the forgotten story of the war on the tracks and explore the numerous ways in which Britain’s locomotives, railway companies and skilled railway workforce moulded the course of the conflict. From mobilizing men and moving weapons, to transporting food for troops and later taking grieving relatives to the battlefields on which their loved ones had fallen, the railways played a central role throughout this turbulent period in our history.
Field Service
by Robert EdricMorlancourt, Northern France, 1920In the aftermath of the world's bloodiest conflict, a small contingent of battle-worn soldiers remains in France. Captain James Reid and his men are tasked with the identification and burial of innumerable corpses as they come to terms with the events of the past four years.The stark contrast between the realities of burying men in France and the reports of honouring the dead back in Britain is all too clear. But it is only when the daily routine is interrupted by a visit from two women, both seeking solace from their grief, that the men are forced to acknowledge the part they too have played.With his trademark unerring precision, Robert Edric explores the emotional hinterland which lies behind the work done by the War Graves Commission in the wake of the First World War.
Winter's Fire: (The Rise of Sigurd 2) (Sigurd #2)
by Giles KristianNorway, AD 785 – a vow of vengeance must be kept . . .Sigurd Haraldarson has proved himself a great warrior . . . and a dangerous enemy.He has gone a long way towards avenging the murder of his family. And yet the oath-breaker King Gorm, who betrayed Sigurd’s father, still lives. And so long as he draws breath, the scales remain unbalanced. The sacred vow to avenge his family burns in Sigurd’s veins, but he must be patient and bide his time. He knows that he and his band of warriors are not yet strong enough to confront the treacherous king. They need silver, they need more spear-brothers to rally to the young Viking’s banner – but more than these, they need to win fame upon the battlefield. And so the fellowship venture west, to Sweden, to fight as mercenaries. And it is there – in the face of betrayal and bloodshed, on a journey that will take him all too close to the halls of Valhalla – that Sigurd’s destiny will be forged. There, in the inferno of winter’s fire . . . The Vikings return in this thrilling, thunderous sequel to Giles Kristian’s bestselling God of Vengeance.
Gallipoli
by Peter FitzSimonsOn 25 April 1915, Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in present-day Turkey to secure the sea route between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. After eight months of terrible fighting, they would fail...To this day, Turkey regards the victory as a defining moment in its history, a heroic last stand in the defence of the Ottoman Empire. But, counter-intuitively, it would come to signify something perhaps even greater for the defeated allies, in particular the Australians and New Zealanders: the birth of their countries’ sense of nationhood. Now, in the year that marks its centenary, the Gallipoli campaign (commemorated each year on 25 April, Anzac Day), resonates with significance as the origin and symbol of Australian and New Zealand identity. As such, the facts of the campaign (which was minor when compared to the overall scale of the First World War: Australian deaths were less than a sixth of their losses on the Western Front) are often forgotten or obscured. Now the celebrated journalist and author Peter FitzSimons, with his trademark vibrancy and expert melding of writing and research, recreates the disastrous campaign as experienced by those who endured it or perished in the attempt.
War Stories
by Sebastian FaulksIn this unique and compelling anthology, Sebastian Faulks and Jorg Hensgen have collected the best fiction about war in the twentieth century. Ranging from the First World War to the Gulf War, these stories depict a soldier's experience from call-up, battle and comradeship, to leave, hospital and trauma in later life. Truly international in scope, this anthology includes stories by Erich Maria Remarque and Pat Barker, Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, Heinrich Boll and Norman Mailer, JG Ballard and Tim O'Brien, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernieres. Together they form a powerful and moving evocation of the horrors of war.
The Dust that Falls from Dreams
by Louis De BernieresA return to the epic romance, heroism, history and warm and eccentric cast of characters that made CAPTAIN CORELLI'S MANDOLIN such an extraordinary hit (2.5 million copies sold).In the brief golden years before the outbreak of World War I, Rosie McCosh and her three very different sisters are growing up in an eccentric household in Kent, with their neighbours the Pitt boys on one side and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood adventure are shadowed by the approach of the conflict that will engulf them on the cusp of adulthood.When the boys end up scattered along the Western Front, Rosie is left confused by her love for two young men - one an infantry soldier and one a flying ace. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?
War and Turpentine: A Novel
by Stefan Hertmans David McKayWINNER OF THE VONDEL PRIZE 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in The Times, Sunday Times and The Economist, and one of the 10 Best Books of 2016 in the New York TimesShortly before his death, Stefan Hertmans' grandfather Urbain Martien gave his grandson a set of notebooks containing the detailed memories of his life. He grew up in poverty around 1900, the son of a struggling church painter who died young, and went to work in an iron foundry at only 13. Afternoons spent with his father at work on a church fresco were Urbain’s heaven; the iron foundry an inferno.During the First World War, Urbain was on the front line confronting the invading Germans, and ever after he is haunted by events he can never forget. The war ends and he marries his great love, Maria Emelia, but she dies tragically in the 1919 flu epidemic. Urbain mourns her bitterly for the rest of his life but, like the obedient soldier he is, he marries her sister at her parents' bidding. The rest is not quite silence, but a marriage with a sad secret at its heart, and the consolations found in art and painting. War and Turpentine is the imaginative reconstruction of a damaged life across the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century; a deeply moving portrayal of family, grief, love and war.
Bad Faith: A History of Family and Fatherland
by Carmen CallilBad Faith tells the story of one of history's most despicable villains and conmen - Louis Darquier, Nazi collaborator and 'Commissioner for Jewish Affairs', who dissembled his way to power in the Vichy government and was responsible for sending thousands of children to the gas chambers. After the war he left France, never to be brought to justice. Early on in his career Louis married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of fantasy and deception, and together they had a child, Anne whom they abandoned in England. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. In Carmen Callil's masterful, elegiac and sometimes darkly comic account, Darquier's rise during the years leading up to the Second World War mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism. Epic, haunting, the product of extraordinary research, this is a study in powerlessness, hatred and the role of remembrance.Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
Fly Away Home
by Christine Nostlinger'The story I'm going to tell is true. It happened to me. It is a tale of Gunpowdertown’Life for Cristal has been upside down for a long time. She can’t even remember a time before the war began. Before potatoes for every meal and bombs raining down from the sky. Before being forced to shelter in the dark, damp cellars. Then one day, Cristal’s home is turned into a pile of rubble and dust five metres high.But a chance offer saves her family. They move to the safety of a wealthy suburb, camping out amongst the chandeliers and family portraits of someone else’s house. That is until the dreaded Russians roll into Vienna and move in too…Includes exclusive material: In the Backstory you can test your knowledge of the book, and learn more about the Second World War Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives. Discover timeless favourites from The Jungle Book and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to modern classics such as The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
Schlump
by Hans Herbert GrimmA GERMAN CLASSIC FROM A FORGOTTEN AUTHORSchlump is seventeen, a romantic, a chancer and a dreamer. It's 1915 so naturally he volunteers for war. In France he is assigned an administrative position in a small town and has a marvellous time. But when he gets to the trenches, where death and mindless destruction are the everyday, he starts to understand something about war. Funny, brutal and charming, here’s the First World War from the perspective of the inimitable Schlump.
A Local Habitation: Life and Times, Volume One 1918-40 (Letters And Memoirs Ser.)
by Richard HoggartRichard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literary, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. In this vivid first volume of autobiography he describes his origins in that milieu. Orphaned at an early age, Hoggart grew up in a working-class district of Leeds, in an intimate world of terraced back-to-backs, visits from the local Board of Guardians, clothing checks and potted-meat sandwiches. With affectionate insight he recreates the family circle - a loving grandmother, one domineering and on gentle aunt, and a bibulous, melancholy uncle - and recalls his early schooling, the friends he made and the mentors he admired. Hard-working and articulate, Hoggart did well enough at grammar school to go on to Leeds University. This volume ends as, having earned a higher degree and travelled in Nazi Germany, he prepares to leave Yorkshire, via the Army, for the world beyond. Wry, compassionate, exact, A Local Habitation is a classic recreation of working-class England between the wars.
Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France (The\resistance Trilogy Ser. #2)
by Caroline MooreheadA SUNDAY TIMES TOP FIVE BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2014From the author of the New York Times bestseller A Train in Winter comes the extraordinary story of a French village that helped save thousands who were pursued by the Gestapo during World War II.High up in the mountains of the southern Massif Central in France lies a cluster of tiny, remote villages united by a long and particular history. During the Nazi occupation, the inhabitants of the Plateau Vivarais Lignon saved several thousand people from the concentration camps. As the victims of Nazi persecution flooded in – resisters, freemasons, communists and Jews, many of them children – the villagers united to keep them safe. The story of why and how these villages came to save so many people has never been fully told. But several of the remarkable architects of the mission are still alive, as are a number of those they saved. Caroline Moorehead has sought out and interviewed many of the people involved in this extraordinary undertaking, and brings us their unforgettable testimonies. It is a story of courage and determination, of a small number of heroic individuals who risked their lives to save others, and of what can be done when people come together to oppose tyranny.
Eichmann before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer
by Bettina StangnethA New York Times Notable Book of 2014Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as 'Manager of the Holocaust', he was able to portray himself, from the defendant's box in Jerusalem in 1960, as an overworked bureaucrat following orders – no more, he said, than 'just a small cog in Adolf Hitler's extermination machine'.How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a principal architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? How had he occupied himself in hiding?Drawing upon an astounding trove of newly discovered documentation, Stangneth gives us a chilling portrait not of a reclusive, taciturn war criminal on the run, but of a highly skilled social manipulator with an inexhaustible ability to reinvent himself, an unrepentant murderer eager for acolytes to discuss past glories and vigorously planning future goals.
The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
by Philip BallPhilip Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim - known to later ages as Paracelsus - stands on the borderline between medieval and modern; a name that is familiar but a man who has been hard to perceive or understand. Contemporary of Luther, enemy of established medicine, scourge of the universities ('at all the German schools you cannot learn as much as at the Frankfurt Fair'), army surgeon and alchemist, myths about him - from his treating diseases from beyond the grave in mid-nineteenth century Salzburg to his Faustian bargain with the devil to regain his youth - have been far more lasting than his actual story. Even during his lifetime, he was rumoured to travel with a magical white horse and to store the elixir of life in the pommel of his sword.But who was Paracelsus and what did he really believe and practice? Although Paracelsus has been seen as both a charlatan and as a founder of modern science, Philip Ball's book reveals a more richly complex man - who used his eyes and ears to learn from nature how to heal, and who wrote influential books on medicine, surgery, alchemy and theology while living a drunken, combative, vagabond life. Above all, Ball reveals a man who was a product of his time - an age of great change in which the church was divided and the classics were rediscovered - and whose bringing together of the seemingly diverse disciplines of alchemy and biology signalled the beginning of the age of rationalism.
Little Girl Lost: A Powerful True Story Of Surviving The Unimaginable
by Barbie Probert-Wright Jean RitchieTwo sisters. A broken childhood. A heartbreaking journey.The extraordinary true story of surviving the unimaginable ... In 1945, seven-year-old Barbie and her sister Eva were trapped, terrified, in wartorn Germany. With their father missing, and hundreds of miles from their mother, news of the approaching army left them confronted with an impossible choice: to face invasion, or to flee on foot.Eva, aged nineteen, was determined to find her mother. For Barbie, twelve years younger, the journey was to be more perilous but, spurred on by her sister's courage and her desperate desire to be reunited with her mother, she joined Eva on a journey no child should ever have to endure.Over three hundred miles across a country ravaged by a terrible war, they encountered unimaginable hardship, extraordinary courage and overwhelming generosity. Against all the odds, they survived. But neither sister came out of the journey unscathed ...
Peter the Great
by Derek WilsonPeter I, Emperor of all the Russias, has been a subject of curiosity and scrutiny for almost three centuries. But what was he really like? Physically, he was a strong, tall man (6' 8'' inches) who unlike previous Russian monarchs was not afraid of hard labour. He was an experienced army officer and navy admiral, a skilful shipbuilder and an amazingly energetic personality. Peter was intelligent, impetuous and also cruel. He quashed several rebellions using whatever means necessary - even mass executions. He personally interrogated his own son, Alexei, suspected of plotting against him (Alexei was the first inmate of a high security political jail in the Peter and Paul fortress). But the political achievements of this monumental figure were staggering. By bringing Russia into Europe and building it into a great European power, he single-handedly changed the course of history. If his vision was left unfulfilled at the time of his death it was only because it was so vast. The scale of Peter's massive reforms changed Russia, and Europe, for ever.
A House Divided: An Easterleigh Hall Novel (Easterleigh Hall #3)
by Margaret GrahamAs the storm clouds gather over Europe, life at Easterleigh Hall is about to change again1937 Evie and her family have struggled to keep Easterleigh Hall, now a hotel, running during the depression, and with war looming, she worries for the children, who have to find their way in a changing world.Bridie is learning her trade at her mother Evie’s side, and is becoming a talented chef. Her cousin James has run away to fight in Spain, leaving the family devastated.And Tim, the boy Bridie has always loved, shocks everyone by joining the Black Shirts and going to Germany, discovering too late that he’s playing a dangerous game. Heartbroken at Tim’s defection, Bridie isn’t sure she can ever forgive him. But somehow these three must find a way to reconcile, because if war does come, they will need each other more than ever…
The Crime and the Silence: Confronting Memory In Jedwabne
by Anna BikontWinner of the European Book Prize'A masterpiece' Jan T. Gross'Terrifying and necessary' Julian Barnes'Scrupulously objective and profoundly personal' Kate AtkinsonOn 10 July 1941 a horrifying crime was committed in the small Polish town of Jedwadbne. Early in the afternoon, the town’s Jewish population – hundreds of men, women and children – were ordered out of their homes, and marched into the town square. By the end of the day most would be dead. It was a massacre on a shocking scale, and one that was widely condemned. But only a few people were brought to justice for their part in the atrocity. The truth of what actually happened on that day was to be suppressed for more than sixty years. Part history, part memoir, part investigation, The Crime and the Silence is an award-winning journalist's account of the events of that day: both the story of a massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past.
Munich: From the Sunday Times bestselling author
by Robert HarrisPRE-ORDER PRECIPICE, THE THRILLING NEW NOVEL FROM ROBERT HARRIS, NOW - PUBLISHING AUGUST 2024Now a major Netflix film starring Jeremy Irons_________________________MUNICH, SEPTEMBER 1938Hitler is determined to start a war. Chamberlain is desperate to preserve the peace.They will meet in a city which forever afterwards will be notorious for what is about to take place.As Chamberlain's plane judders over the channel and the Fuhrer's train steams south, two young men travel with their leaders. Former friends from a more peaceful time, they are now on opposing sides.As Britain's darkest hour approaches, the fate of millions could depend on them - and the secrets they're hiding.Spying. Betrayal. Murder. Is any price too high for peace?_________________________'A brilliantly constructed spy novel' Observer'Grips from start to finish ... Superb' Mail on Sunday_________________________Now available: V2, Robert Harris's latest historical thriller