The worst storm in history seen from the wheelhouse of a doomed fishing trawler; a mesmerisingly vivid account of a natural hell from a perspective that offers no escape.The ‘perfect storm’ is a once-in-a-hundred-years combination: a high pressure system from the Great Lakes, running into storm winds over an Atlantic island – Sable Island – and colliding with a weather system from the Caribbean: H…
Henry Stuart’s life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty Years’ War and the huge changes taking place across Europe in seventeenth-century society, economy, politics and empire, his life was visually and verbally gorgeous.NOW THE SUBJECT OF BBC2 DOCUMENTARY The Best King We Never HadHenry Stuart, Prince of Wales was once the hope of Britain. Eldest son t…
From the bestselling author of ‘Fighter Boys’, the true story of two ruthless adversaries and a wartime killing that shook the modern world.On a cold, bright morning in February 1942, fugitive Avraham Stern was cornered in a flat in Tel-Aviv and shot dead. His killer, Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, claimed Stern was trying to escape. But Stern was no ordinary criminal. And witnesses ins…
For the quality of its research and the clarity of its synthesis, The Rise of Respectable Society will gain a reputation as an outstanding reinterpretation of the Victorian period.In the years since the appearance of G. M. Young’s brilliant survey, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, a mass of new research from new perspectives has entirely changed the landscape of the Victorian era. The Rise o…
‘As gripping as any spy thriller, Hastings’s achievement is especially impressive, for he has produced the best single volume yet written on the subject’ Sunday Times‘Authoritative, exciting and notably well written’ Daily Telegraph‘A serious work of rigourous and comprehensive history … royally entertaining and readable’ Mail on SundayIn ‘The Secret War’, Max Hastings examines the espionage and i…
In this Samuel Johnson Prize short-listed work of meticulous scholarship, Paul Preston, the world’s foremost historian of 20th-century Spain, charts how and why Franco and his supporters set out to eliminate all ‘those who do not think as we do’ – some 200,000 innocent men, women and children across Spain.The remains of General Franco lie in an immense mausoleum near Madrid, built with the blood a…
An intensely moving account of George III’s doomed attempt to create a happy, harmonious family, written with astonishing emotional force by a stunning new history writer.George III came to the throne in 1760 as a man with a mission. He wanted to be a new kind of king, one whose power was rooted in the affection and approval of his people. And he was determined to revolutionise his private life to…
The second volume of Doris Lessing’s ‘Collected African Stories’, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.‘As for these stories – when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external an…
In an extraordinary history of the criminal trial, Sadakat Kadri shows with wit, legal insight and a travel writer’s eye for detail, how the irrationality of the past lives on in the legal systems of the present. A bold and brilliant debut from a prize-winning writer.‘The Trial’ spans a vast distance in time, opening in the dread silence of the Egyptian Hall of the Dead and ending with the melodra…
‘A love story told in exquisitely poetic letters’ DAILY MAILTorn apart by war, their letters meant everything…‘My love. I am writing to you without knowing where you are but I will find you after all these long months…’3rd September 1938. Martin Preston is in his second year of Oxford when his world is split in two by a beautiful redhead, Nancy Whelan. A whirlwind romance blossoms in the Buckingha…
Set in the Jewish homeland of … Alaska, this is a brilliantly original novel from Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’.What if, as Franklin Roosevelt once proposed, Alaska – and not Israel – had become the homeland for the Jews after the Second World War? In Michael Chabon’s Yiddish-speaking ‘Alyeska’, Orthodox gangs in side-curls and knee br…
A superb collection of short stories from Reginald Hill, the award-winning author of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels and ‘the best living male crime writer in the English-speaking world’ (Independent)In suburban Luton, a private detective on his first case discovers that curiosity can kill more than just the cat…Meanwhile, in wartime Boulogne, one officer will do anything to ensure that his men are …
She was a slave. He was her master. Both of them long to be free…1833 – The British Navy are conducting a survey of the Arabian Peninsula where slavery is as rife as ever despite being abolition. Zena, a headstrong and determined young Abyssinian beauty has been torn from her remote village, subjected to a tortuous journey and is now being offered for sale in the market of Muscat.Lieutenant James …
England, 1888 “There are things that walk abroad on the moor that should not. But the dead do not always lie quietly, do they, lady?” Grimsgrave Manor is an unhappy house, isolated on the Yorkshire moors, silent and secretive. Then its shroud of gothic gloom is lifted by a visit from the incurably curious Lady Julia Grey.Lady Julia intends to bring a woman’s touch to the restoration of Nicholas Br…
TEATIME FOR THE FIREFLYLayla Roy has defied the fates. Despite being born under an inauspicious horoscope, she is raised to be educated and independently-minded by her eccentric Anglophile grandfather, Dadamoshai. And, by cleverly manipulating the hand fortune has dealt her, she has even found love with Manik Deb—a man betrothed to another. All were minor miracles in India that spring of 1943, whe…