Adrian Houston is a tree photographer and passionate conservationist. His work has seen him travel to some of the world's most unexplored and inhospitable terrains, with his powerful photographs subsequently gracing everything from advertising campaigns to magazine covers. In 2021 he published A Portrait of the Tree, a photography book that illustrated how trees connect us all on a universal level. Adrian's work has been exhibited both at The National Gallery and The Royal Academy of Arts. When he is not travelling, he is based at his studio in Soho, central London.

Adrian Houston

Adrian J Walker was born in the bush suburbs of Sydney, Australia in the mid '70s. After his father found a camper van in a ditch, he renovated it and moved his family back to the UK, where Adrian was raised. 
 
Ever since he can remember, Adrian has been interested in three things: words, music and technology, and when he graduated from the University of Leeds, he found a career in software. His novel The End of the World Running Club, a post-apocalyptic running fable about hope, love and endurance, was a Simon Mayo Radio 2 book club choice. 
 
He lives in Aberdeen with his wife and two children. To find out more visit: http://www.adrianjwalker.com/

Adrian J. Walker

Adrian Levy

Adrian Mourby

Adrian Orchard

Adrian Penketh

Adrian Raine

Adrian Reynolds was born in South Wales, and after studying at Swansea College of Art and later at Cambridgeshire College of Art and Technology, Adrian worked at Heffers Children's Book Shop before beginning to write and illustrate his own picture books. 
 
Adrian's very first books were published in 1997 and since then he has published more than forty titles, including the hugely popular Harry And The Bucketful Of Dinosaurs series, written by Ian Whybrow. He has won the Red House Picture Book Award and the Sheffield Children's Book Award.

Adrian Reynolds

Adrian Reynolds is a hugely talented illustrator who has worked on many picture books,including the wonderful Harry stories and four adventures featuring Pete and Polo. Adrian lives in Cambridge

Adrian Smith was born in Hackney, East London, on 27th February 1957. He joined Iron Maiden at the end of 1980. Adrian is the band member who has collaborated on the most side projects outside of Iron Maiden, as well as writing and recording a series of albums in the early '90s, before rejoining the band. Iron Maiden have sold 90 million albums, and tour the world playing to millions of fans. Onstage, Adrian uses Jackson and Gibson guitars. Offstage, he is an avid tennis player, however his main hobby is fishing. He takes his rod and gear out on tour with him wherever he goes. This is his first book.

Adrian Smith

Adrian Sykes

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold, published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include novels Guns of the Dawn, Children of Time, Children of Ruin and the Echoes of the Fall series starting with The Tiger and the Wolf. He has won the Arthur C Clarke and Robert Holdstock awards.

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tinniswood is professorial research fellow in history at the University of Buckingham, adjunct professor of history at Maynooth University and the author of many books on British history, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Long Weekend. He was awarded an OBE for services to heritage, and lives in the west of Ireland.

Adrian Tinniswood

Adrian Webster

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist at Bloomberg Opinion. Previously, he worked for the Economist for thirty-two years, including stints as its Lexington, Schumpeter and Bagehot columnist. He earned a doctorate in history from Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of All Souls College. He is the author or co-author of 11 other books, including The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy made the Modern World (2021).

Adrian Wooldridge

Adriana Arden

Adriana Hunter has translated more than one hundred books, and has won or been shortlisted for numerous translation prizes, most recently as the runner-up for the 2024 Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly. She lives in Kent, England.

Adriana Hunter

Adriana Mather is the author of the New York Times bestselling How to Hang a Witch series and the Killing November series. Adriana is also an actor and producer and co-owns Zombot Pictures, a production company that makes feature films.

Adriana Mather

Adriana Rabinovich spent her childhood in Colombia, then moved to the US before coming to Britain in 1984. Following a career in design and marketing, Adriana trained at Leith's School of Food and Wine, then set up her own catering business, followed by The Little Red Barn in 1996. When her daughter was diagnosed with Coeliac disease at the age of eighteen months, Adriana used her catering and cooking knowledge to create recipes that not only worked for Ruthie's needs but appealed to children. The result is The Gluten-Free Cookbook for Kids.

Adriana Rabinovich

Adriana Trigiani is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction published in thirty-eight languages. In 2023, President Sergio Mattarella of Italy named her Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia. She is an award-winning playwright, television writer/producer, and filmmaker. Among her screen credits, Trigiani wrote and directed the major motion picture adaptation of her debut novel, Big Stone Gap. Adriana grew up in Appalachia, in the mountains of southwest Virginia, where she cofounded the Origin Project, an in-school writing program. Trigiani is honored to serve on the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in Greenwich Village with her family. 
 
 Listen to Adriana and the luminaries of our times discuss the books that built their souls on the You Are What You Read podcast, available everywhere. https://linktr.ee/youarewhatyoureadpodcast

Adriana Trigiani

Adrienne  Kennaway

Adrienne Adhami is a leading well-being coach and keynote speaker, known for the motivational podcast Power Hour and the Modern Wellness Podcast. 
 
Adrienne is a sought-after brand advisor, specialising in well-being technology, strategy and innovation. She has delivered workshops and keynote speeches to brands including Apple, Spotify, Bupa and Range Rover. Her expertise ranges from achieving high performance to goal-setting and decision-making. 
 
Adrienne’s debut book, Power Hour, was published in 2020 and has since been translated into four languages. Listed as one of the ‘Top 25 Black Entrepreneurs to Watch’ by HSBC and UKBBS, Adrienne is a trailblazer inspiring individuals and organisations to reach their full potential. Decisions That Matter is her second book.

Adrienne Adhami

In 1995 Adrienne Brodeur co-founded, along with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the National Magazine Award-winning fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story. She then worked as a book editor in New York for several years, and is currently the Executive Director of the Aspen Words, a literary non-profit and part of the Aspen Institute in Colorado. She divides her time between New York City and Cape Cod.

Adrienne Brodeur

Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children.

As well as hosting the weekly Power Hour podcast, Adrienne Adhami is a leading wellness professional, TEDx speaker and a voice of inspiration, encouragement and motivation. Adrienne delivers talks and workshops to some of the world’s largest organisations and she regularly hosts live events and panel discussions. She has partnered with brands such as Adidas, Origins, Virgin Sport, Google and Apple and has been featured in ELLE magazine and the Telegraph, as well as being named a ‘New Face of Wellness’ by British VOGUE.

Adrienne Herbert

ADELE GERAS was born in Jerusalem and travelled widely as a child. She started writing over twenty-five years ago and has published more than 80 titles. Ithaka was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Chirldren's Book Award. She lives in Manchester with her husband and has two grown-up daughters and two grandchildren.

Adèle Geras

Aeham Ahmad, born in Damascus in 1988, grew up in Yarmouk, a suburb of Damascus. From the age of four onwards his father encouraged his musical talent and at seven he received piano lessons at the Arab Institute in Damascus. He later studied music education in Homs and worked as a music teacher. 
 
In 2015 he was forced to flee to Germany because of the war in Syria. Today he lives with his family in Wiesbaden and gives concerts all over Europe. In December 2015, Ahmad was awarded the International Beethoven Prize for Human Rights. 
 
This is his first book.

Aeham Ahmad

Aemilia Lanyer

Aeneas Gunn

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Florian Huber

One of the least understood stories of the Third Reich is that of the extraordinary wave of suicides, carried out not just by much of the Nazi leadership, but also by thousands of ordinary Germans during the war's closing period. Some of these were provoked by straightforward terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many could not be explained in such relatively straightforward terms. 
 
Florian Huber's remarkable book confronts this terrible phenomenon. Other countries have suffered defeat, but not responded in the same way. What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood years of deprivation and suffering, to do this? 
 
In a brilliantly written, thoughtful and original work, Huber describes some of the key events from the First World War to the end of the Second which shaped the period, showing how the sheer intensity, allure and ferocity of Hitler's regime swept along millions. Its sudden end was, for many of them, simply impossible to absorb.

Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself

The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945

Otto Dov Kulka

Winner of the JEWISH QUARTERLY WINGATE PRIZE 2014 
 
Sent as a child first to the ghetto of Theresienstadt then on to Auschwitz, survivor Otto Dov Kulka spent a lifetime studying the Holocaust. In these illustrated deeply personal reflections he brings to shocking and moving life moments and fragments of memory he cannot forget. 
 
'Fewer still will know that for a decade I made tape-recordings which allowed me to describe the images that well up in my memory and explore the remembrance of what in my private mythology is called "The Metropolis of Death", or in deceptive simplicity: 'Childhood Landscapes of Auschwitz".' 
 
Translated by Ralph Mandel.

Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death

Reflections on Memory and Imagination

Dominic Sandbrook

The early 1980s were the most dramatic, colourful and controversial years in our modern history. Margaret Thatcher had come to power in 1979 with a daring plan to reverse Britain's decline. But as factories closed their doors, dole queues lengthened and the inner cities exploded in flames, would her harsh medicine rescue the Sick Man of Europe - or kill it off? 
 
Evocative, surprising and gloriously entertaining, Dominic Sandbrook's new book recreates the great turning point in Britain's modern history. For some people this was an age of unparalleled opportunity, the heyday of computers and credit cards, Sloane Rangers and Spandau Ballet. But as industries collapsed, working-class communities buckled and the Labour Party tore itself apart, it was also an age of extraordinary acrimony. And when Argentine forces seized the Falklands, it seemed the final humiliation for a deeply divided country. 
 
Here are the early 1980s in all their gaudy glory: Chariots of Fire, Joy Division, the Austin Metro and Juliet Bravo; wine bars, Cruise missiles, the battle of Goose Green and the ZX Spectrum. And towering above them all, the most controversial Prime Minister in our modern history - the Iron Lady.

Who Dares Wins

Britain, 1979-1982

Francis Fukuyama

Ever since its first publication in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists, populists and pandemics as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic.

The End of History and the Last Man

Sinclair McKay

In February 1945 the Allies obliterated the German city of Dresden. Bombs weighing over 1,000 lbs fell every seven and a half seconds and killing an estimated 25,000 people. But was Dresden a legitimate military target or a last act of mass murder in a war already won? 
 
In Dresden, bestselling author Sinclair McKay creates a vast canvas and brings it alive with touching human detail, from the history of the city to the attack itself through the eerie period of reconstruction. Impeccably researched and deeply moving, McKay uses never-before-seen sources to relate the untold stories of a city, its people and their triumph in the face of disaster.

Dresden

The Fire and the Darkness

Brendan Simms

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms' major new biography shows, Hitler's main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism, but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-semitism and his determination to secure the 'living space' and living standards necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States. 
 
Drawing on new sources, Brendan Simms traces the way in which Hitler's ideology emerged after the First World War. The United States and the British Empire were, in his view, models for Germany's own empire, similarly founded on appropriation of land, racism and violence. Hitler's aim was to create a similarly global future for Germany - a country seemingly doomed otherwise not just to irrelevance, but, through emigration and foreign influence, to extinction. His principal concern during the resulting cataclysm was not just what he saw as the clash between German and Jews, or German and Slav, but above all that between Germans and what he called the 'Anglo-Saxons'. In the end only dominance of the world would have been enough to achieve Hitler's objectives, and it ultimately required a coalition of virtually the entire world to defeat him. 
 
Brendan Simms's new book is the first to explain Hitler's beliefs fully, demonstrating how, as ever, it is ideas that are the ultimate source of the most murderous behaviour.

Hitler

Only the World Was Enough

In this gloriously colourful book, Dominic Sandbrook recreates the extraordinary period of the late 1970s in all its chaos and contradiction, revealing it as a decisive point in our recent history. Across the country, a profound argument about the future of the nation was being played out, not just in families and schools but in everything from episodes of Doctor Who to singles by the Clash. These years saw the peak of trade union power and the apogee of an old working-class Britain - but also the birth of home computers, the rise of the ready meal and the triumph of the Grantham grocer's daughter who would change our history forever.

Seasons in the Sun

Britain, 1974-1979

The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss. The headlines were dominated by strikes and blackouts, unemployment and inflation. As the world looked on in horrified fascination, Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart. And yet, amid the gloom, glittered a creativity and cultural dynamism that would influence our lives long after the nightmarish Seventies had been forgotten. 
 
In this brilliant new history, Dominic Sandbrook recreates the gaudy, schizophrenic atmosphere of the early Seventies: the world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, David Bowie and Brian Clough, Germaine Greer and Mary Whitehouse. An age when the unions were on the march and the socialist revolution seemed at hand, but also when feminism, permissiveness, pornography and environmentalism were transforming the lives of millions. It was an age of miners' strikes, tower blocks and IRA atrocities, but it also gave us celebrity footballers and high-street curry houses, organic foods and package holidays, gay rights and glam rock. 
 
For those who remember the days when you could buy a new colour television but power cuts stopped you from watching it, this book could hardly be more vivid. It is the perfect guide to a luridly colourful Seventies landscape that shaped our present from the financial boardroom to the suburban bedroom.

State of Emergency

Britain, 1970-1974

The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974

Susan Neiman

What can we learn from the past in order to move forward? 
 
Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman, who grew up as a white girl in the American South during the civil rights movement, is a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. In clear and gripping prose, she uses this unique perspective to combine philosophical reflection, personal history and conversations with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. 
 
Through focusing on the particularities of those histories, she provides examples for other nations, whether they are facing resurgent nationalism, ongoing debates over reparations or controversies surrounding historical monuments and the contested memories they evoke. It is necessary reading for all those confronting their own troubled pasts.

Learning from the Germans

Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil

Frank Close

'Trinity' was the codename for the test explosion of the atomic bomb in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. This exceptional book - Trinity - tells the story of the bomb's metaphorical father, Rudolf Peierls; his intellectual son, the atomic spy, Klaus Fuchs, and the ghosts of the security services in Britain, the USA and USSR. 
 
Against the background of pre-war Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the following Cold War, the book traces how Peierls brought Fuchs into his family and his laboratory, only to be betrayed. It describes how Fuchs became a spy, his motivations and the information he passed to his Soviet contacts, both in the UK and after he went with Peierls to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos in 1944. Frank Close is himself a distinguished nuclear physicist: uniquely, the book explains the science as well as the spying. Fuchs returned to Britain in August 1946 and became central to the UK's independent effort to develop nuclear weapons. Close describes the febrile atmosphere at Harwell, the nuclear physics laboratory near Oxford, and the charged relationships which developed there, and shows how - despite mistakes made by both MI5 and the FBI - the net gradually closed around Fuchs, building an intolerable pressure which finally cracked him. 
 
The Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear device in August 1949, far earlier than the US or UK expected. In 1951, the US Congressional Committee on Atomic Espionage concluded, 'Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States, but in the history of nations'. This book is the most comprehensive account yet published of these events, and of the tragic figure at their centre.

Trinity

The Treachery and Pursuit of the Most Dangerous Spy in History

Alison Light

Alison Light met the radical social historian, Raphael Samuel, in London in 1986. Twenty years her senior, Raphael was a charismatic socialist from a very different background to Alison's working-class family. Within a year they were married. Within ten, Raphael would be dead. 
 
In this chronicle of a passionate marriage, Alison Light peels back the layers of their time together, its intimacies and its estrangements. She tells of moving into Raphael's cluttered 18th-century house in Spitalfields and into his equally full, unconventional life; of the whirlwind of change outside their door which brutally transformed London's old East End districts; of being widowed at 41, and finding inspiration in her friendship with Raphael's mother. A Radical Romance is a luminous and deeply intelligent memoir of love and grief.

A Radical Romance

A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation

Clare Pollard

What is The Tiger Who Came to Tea really about? 
 How is Meg and Mog related to Polish embroidery? 
 And why does death in picture books involve being eaten? 
 
Fierce Bad Rabbits explores the stories behind our favourite picture books, weaving in tales of Clare Pollard's childhood reading and her re-discovery of the classic tales as a parent. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem - and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used wisely, and the wild things are closer than you think.

Fierce Bad Rabbits

The Tales Behind Children's Picture Books

Serhii Plokhy

In November 1943, with the outcome of the Second World War hanging in the balance, the Allies needed a new plan. The Americans' audacious suggestion to the Soviets was to open a second air front, with the US Air Force establishing bases in Soviet-controlled territory. Despite Stalin's obvious reservations about the presence of foreign troops in Russia, he was persuaded, and in early 1944 and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated as B-17 Superfortresses were flown from bases in Italy to the Poltova region in today's Ukraine. 
 
Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy tells the gripping, little-known story of this encounter between American and Soviet soldiers and how their collaboration quickly fell apart, mirroring the transition from the Grand Alliance to the Cold War. Soviet secret policemen watched over the Americans, shadowing their every move. A catastrophic air raid by the Germans revealed the limitations of Soviet air defences. As their initial enthusiasm turned into disappointment, the American soldiers started calling themselves the Forgotten Bastards of Ukraine. Ultimately, no common purpose could overcome their cultural and political differences. 
 
Drawing on newly opened Russian archives as well as CIA records, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front offers a riveting bottom-up history one of the Second World War's most unlikely alliances.

Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front

An Untold Story of World War II

Peter Hennessy

Having It So Good evokes Britain emerging from the shadow of war and the privations of austerity and rationing into growing affluence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and now coffee bars of 1950s Britain - and also into the secret Cabinet rooms in which decisions about the British nuclear bomb were taken and plans made for the catastrophe of nuclear war. He brings to life the ageing Churchill, in his last faltering spell as Prime Minister, the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking his country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion, and the rise of 'Supermac' Harold Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance. Above all, Having It So Good captures the smell and the flavour of an extraordinary decade in which affluence and anxiety combined to produce their own winds of change.

Having it So Good

Britain in the Fifties

Justin Marozzi

Islamic civilization was once the envy of the world. From a succession of glittering, cosmopolitan capitals, Islamic empires lorded it over the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and swathes of the Indian subcontinent. For centuries the caliphate was both ascendant on the battlefield and triumphant in the battle of ideas, its cities unrivalled powerhouses of artistic grandeur, commercial power, spiritual sanctity and forward-looking thinking. 
 
Islamic Empires is a history of this rich and diverse civilization told through its greatest cities over fifteen centuries, from the beginnings of Islam in Mecca in the seventh century to the astonishing rise of Doha in the twenty-first. 
 
It dwells on the most remarkable dynasties ever to lead the Muslim world - the Abbasids of Baghdad, the Umayyads of Damascus and Cordoba, the Merinids of Fez, the Ottomans of Istanbul, the Mughals of India and the Safavids of Isfahan - and some of the most charismatic leaders in Muslim history, from Saladin in Cairo and mighty Tamerlane of Samarkand to the poet-prince Babur in his mountain kingdom of Kabul and the irrepressible Maktoum dynasty of Dubai. It focuses on these fifteen cities at some of the defining moments in Islamic history: from the Prophet Mohammed receiving his divine revelations in Mecca and the First Crusade of 1099 to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the phenomenal creation of the merchant republic of Beirut in the nineteenth century.

Islamic Empires

Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization

The first volume of Hennessy's postwar history of Britain concerns an age dominated by the shadow of war. With the beginnings of the Cold War, the foundations of the new Europe and the granting of independence of former colonies, Britain was forced to negotiate a new place in the world. It was also a time of rationing and of rebuilding, marked by the founding of the NHS and the welfare state. This comprehensive history embraces both high politics and everyday experience. It recreates the mood of the time and tells us where people lived, how they worked and what they wore.

Never Again

Britain 1945-1951

Harold Macmillan - the presiding figure in Peter Hennessy's magnificent new history - famously said in 1960 that the wind of change was blowing over Africa and the remaining British Empire. But it was blowing over Britain too - its society; its relationship with Europe; its nuclear and defence policy. And where it was not blowing hard enough - the United Kingdom's economy - great efforts were made to wipe away the cobwebs of old industrial practices and poor labour relations. Life was lived in the knowledge that it could end in a single afternoon of thermonuclear exchange if the uneasy, armed peace of the Cold War tipped into a third world war. As with his acclaimed histories of British life in the two previous decades, Never Again and Having it so Good, Peter Hennessy explains the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of a nation with inimitable wit and empathy.

Winds of Change

Britain in the Early Sixties

Isabel Wilkerson

From 1915 to 1970, an exodus of almost six million people would change the face of America. With stunning historical detail, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson gives us this definitive, vividly dramatic account of how these journeys unfolded. 
 
Based on interviews with more than a thousand people, and access to new data and official records, The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of America's Great Migration through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. 
 
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of a hitherto "unrecognized immigration".

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Mark B. Smith

Russia is an exceptional country, the biggest in the world. It is both European and exotic, powerful and weak, brilliant and flawed. Why are we so afraid of it? 
 
Time and again, we judge Russia by unique standards. We have usually assumed that it possesses higher levels of cunning, malevolence and brutality than other countries. Yet it has more often than not been a crucial ally, not least against Napoleon and in the two world wars. We admire its music and its writers. We lavish praise on the Russian soul. And still we think of Russia as a unique menace. What is it about this extraordinary country that consistently provokes such excessive responses? And why is this so dangerous? 
 
Mark B. Smith's remarkable new book is a history of this 'Russia Anxiety'. Whether Russia has been ally or enemy, superpower or failing state, it has always had a exceptional status in our imagination.

The Russia Anxiety

And How History Can Resolve It

Catherine Bailey

In September, 1944, the SS march into a remote Italian castle, arrest a mother and seize her two sons, aged just two and three. If Hitler has his way she will never see them again. For Fey Pirzio-Biroli is the daughter of Ulrich von Hassell, executed days before after the failed assassination of the Fuhrer. Mercilessly cast into the Nazi death machine, Fey must cling to the hope that one day she will escape and rescue her lost children . . .

Fey's War

The True Story of a Mother, her Missing Sons and the Plot to Kill Hitler

Caelainn Hogan

Until alarmingly recently, the Catholic Church, acting in concert with the Irish state, operated a network of institutions for the concealment, punishment and exploitation of 'fallen women'. In the Magdalene laundries, girls and women were incarcerated and condemned to servitude. And in the mother-and-baby homes, women who had become pregnant out of wedlock were hidden from view, and in most cases their babies were adopted - sometimes illegally. 
 
Mortality rates in these institutions were shockingly high, and the discovery of a mass infant grave at the mother-and-baby home in Tuam made news all over the world. The Irish state has commissioned investigations. But the workings of the institutions and of the culture that underpinned it - a shame-industrial complex - have long been cloaked in secrecy and silence. For countless people, a search for answers continues. 
 
Caelainn Hogan - a brilliant young journalist, born in an Ireland that was only just starting to free itself from the worst excesses of Catholic morality - has been talking to the survivors of the institutions, to members of the religious orders that ran them, and to priests and bishops. She has visited the sites of the institutions, and studied Church and state documents that have much to reveal about how they operated. Reporting and writing with great curiosity, tenacity and insight, she has produced a startling and often moving account of how an entire society colluded in this repressive system, and of the damage done to survivors and their families. In the great tradition of Anna Funder's Stasiland and Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea - both winners of the Samuel Johnson Prize - Republic of Shame is an astounding portrait of a deeply bizarre culture of control.

Republic of Shame

How Ireland Punished ‘Fallen Women’ and Their Children

Stories from Ireland's Institutions for 'Fallen Women'

Jared Diamond

In his landmark international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now in the third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis. 
 
Diamond shows us how seven countries have survived defining upheavals in the recent past - from the forced opening up of Japan and the Soviet invasion of Finland to the Pinochet regime in Chile - through selective change, a process of painful self-appraisal and adaptation more commonly associated with personal trauma. Looking ahead to the future, he investigates whether the United States, and the world, are squandering their natural advantages and are on a devastating path towards catastrophe. Is this fate inevitable? Or can we still learn from the lessons of the past? 
 
Exhibiting the awe-inspiring grasp of history, geography, economics and anthropology that marks all Diamond's work, Upheaval reveals how both nations and individuals can become more resilient. The result is a book epic in scope, but also his most personal yet.

Upheaval

How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change

Ivan Krastev

Stephen Holmes

Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? 
 
In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland of the West. 
 
In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. 
 
Through this prism, the Trump revolution represents an ironic fulfillment of the promise that the nations exiting from communist rule would come to resemble the United States. In a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary into models for the United States. 
 
Written by two pre-eminent intellectuals bridging the East/West divide, The Light that Failed is a landmark book that sheds light on the extraordinary history of our Age of Imitation.

The Light that Failed

A Reckoning

Antony Beevor

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER ON THE LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD REICH 
 
2025 marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Read and remember the history that led to this important moment. 
 
'Recounts, in harrowing detail and with formidable skill, the brutal death-throes of Hitler's Reich at the hands of the rampaging Red Army' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 
 
'An irresistibly compelling narrative, of events so terrible that they still have the power to provoke wonder and awe' Adam Sisman, Observer 
 
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army. 
 
Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge and savagery ­- but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds. 
 
'Makes us feel the chaos and the fear as if every drop of blood was our own . . . compellingly readable, deeply researched, and beautifully written' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Spectator 
 
'Brilliant. Combines a soldier's understanding of war's realities with a novelist's eye for detail' Orlando Figes, Sunday Times 
 
'Startling, chilling, compelling. Beevor's writing burns like a torch at night in a landscape of ruins'Literary Review 
 
'Powerful, diligently researched and beautifully written . . . even better than Stalingrad' Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday

Berlin

The Downfall 1945

Roderick Beaton

We think we know ancient Greece, the civilization that shares the same name and gave us just about everything that defines 'western' culture today, in the arts, sciences, social sciences and politics. Yet, as Greece has been brought under repeated scrutiny during the financial crises that have convulsed the country since 2010, worldwide coverage has revealed just how poorly we grasp the modern nation. This book sets out to understand the modern Greeks on their own terms. 
 
How did Greece come to be so powerfully attached to the legacy of the ancients in the first place, and then to define an identity for its people that is at once Greek and modern? This book reveals the remarkable achievement, during the last 300 years, of building a modern nation on, sometimes literally, the ruins of a vanished civilization. This is the story of the Greek nation state but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, of the collective identity that goes with it. It is not only a history of events and high politics, it is also a history of culture, of the arts, of people and of ideas.

Greece

Biography of a Modern Nation

Virginia Nicholson

Turn the page back to the 1960s, a decade whose radiant light-show seemed to shower everything it touched with stardust: in the midst of Beatlemania, Penguin Books are found 'Not Guilty' in the Lady Chatterley trial, Mary Quant introduces the mini-skirt, and the Pill becomes available on the NHS. Time magazine coins the phrase 'Swinging London', the first female High Court Judge is appointed and abortion is legalized. 
 
But did the world really change for women? And what did the women of the 60s ultimately take away from a youth supposedly given over to sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll? This book is an act of homage and a journey for those engaging in similar questions today. How Was It For You? reconstructs the real 1960s, through the eyes of the women who lived it. From Floella Benjamin and Pattie Boyd to ordinary, remarkable women, this is their story.

How Was It For You?

Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s

Sarah Knott

What was mothering like in the past? When acclaimed historian Sarah Knott became pregnant, she asked herself this question. But accounts of motherhood are hard to find. For centuries, historians have concerned themselves with wars, politics and revolutions, not the everyday details of carrying and caring for a baby. Much to do with becoming a mother, past or present, is lost or forgotten. 
 
Using the arc of her own experience, from miscarriage to the birth and early babyhood of her two children, Sarah Knott explores the ever-changing habits and experiences of motherhood across the ages. 
 
From the labour pains felt by a South Carolina field slave to the triumphant smile of a royal mistress pregnant with a king's first son; from a 1950s suburban housewife to a working-class East Ender taking her baby to the factory; these remarkable tales of mothering create a moving depiction of an endlessly various human experience.

Mother

An Unconventional History

Richard Bassett

In 1979 Richard Bassett set out on a series of adventures in central Europe which allowed him to savour the last embers of the cosmopolitan old Hapsburg lands and gave him a ringside seat at the fall of another ancien regime, that of communist rule. From Trieste to Prague and Vienna to Warsaw, fading aristocrats, charming gangsters, fractious diplomats and glamorous informants provided him with an unexpected counterpoint to the austerities of life along the Iron Curtain, first as a professional musician and then as a foreign correspondent. 
 
The book shows us familiar events and places from unusual vantage points: dilapidated mansions and boarding-houses, train carriages and cafes, where the game of espionage between east and west is often set. Music and painting, architecture and landscape, food and wine, friendship and history run through the book. The author is lucky, observant and leans romantically towards the values of an older age. He brilliantly conjures the time, the people he meets, and Mitteleuropa in one of the pivotal decades of its history.

Last Days in Old Europe

Trieste '79, Vienna '85, Prague '89

Geoffrey Wellum

Two months before the outbreak of WWII, seventeen-year-old Geoffrey Wellum becomes a fighter pilot with the RAF . . . 
 
Desperate to get in the air, he makes it through basic training to become the youngest Spitfire pilot in the prestigious 92 Squadron. Thrust into combat almost immediately, Wellum finds himself flying several sorties a day, caught up in terrifying dogfights with German Me 109s. 
 
Over the coming months he and his fellow pilots play a crucial role in the Battle of Britain. But of the friends that take to the air alongside Wellum, many never return.

First Light

The Phenomenal Fighter Pilot Bestseller

Original Edition

Cameron Spence

With the outbreak of Gulf War hostilities a unit from 22 SAS slipped quietly over the border and into the enemy's backyard. It would be six weeks before any of the patrol again reached safety. 
 
Sabre Squadron recounts in graphic detail their scud-busting operations deep inside Iraq. They were operating alone and out of reach of reinforcements, with the threat of detection and its fatal consequences ever present. Yet their determination to wreak havoc behind enemy lines remained undimmed, culminating in an attack that decisively reconfirmed the regiment's awesome reputation. 
 
Cameron Spence, a senior NCO on the operation, takes you as close to the fighting SAS as you are ever likely to get, conveying the relentless tension, black humour and camaraderie punctuated by explosive, nerve-shredding action that characterized the mission. 
 
This is the true story of an SAS operation of breathtaking audacity and flair, carried out under unimaginable pressure, in the face of impossible odds.

Sabre Squadron

Code Red

Commissaire Adamsberg

Confessions

Confessions of a Working Girl

Conversations from a Long Marriage

Cosy Colouring

County Cup

Coven of Bones

Crash Bang Wallop

Crazy House

Crimson Lake Series

Critical Role

Cross My Heart

The Crossfire series is a quintet that follows the emotional and romantic journey taken by Gideon Cross and Eva Tramell. A number one internationally bestselling series, the Crossfire books are available in forty territories . . . and counting.

Crossfire

Crown

Cruel is the Light

Detective Harry Virdee should be at home with his wife, but he's been suspended from work just as the biggest case of the year lands on what would have been his desk. He can't keep himself away . . . 
 
Luther meets The Wire in this gritty crime series set in Bradford.

D.I. Harry Virdee

DC Icons

London has a new detective - DC Max Wolfe is on the hunt and he means to get his man, whatever the consequences…

DC Max Wolfe

DC Super Hero Girls

DCI Daley Thrillers

DI Eve Hunter

DI Fawley

DI Helen Grace Novellas

Crumpled, slapdash and foul-mouthed as ever, Detective Inspector Jack Frost struggles to cope with inadequate back-up and never enough time; the unsolved crimes pile up and the vicious killings go on. Frost must cut corners and take risks as he staggers from crisis to crisis, rapists to murderers, missing bodies to discovered body parts; will he be able to keep Denton safe?

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