A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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J.M. Maloney

'A tale of survival.' Daily Mail 
 
'Survival against the odds ... [an] amazing story.' The Sun 
 
In 1939 Annie Jarman and her six young daughters were evacuated from their south London home and sent to the Sussex countryside to wait out the war. Refusing to be parted, they faced the unknown together, never imagining just how much their lives would change. 
 
 From the trials and tribulations of leaving London, the destructive horror of the Blitz and terrible family tragedy to dances, romances and the triumph of making a new life in the country, The Sisters of Battle Road is the compelling true story of six ordinary girls in extraordinary wartime circumstances. 
 
 Today, the six young girls – Mary, Joan, Sheila, Kathleen, Patricia and Ann – are six remarkable women who have lived to tell their tale of sisterhood and its unbreakable bonds in the shadow of World War Two.

The Sisters of Battle Road

The Extraordinary True Story of Six Sisters Evacuated from Wartime London

Craig Bartholomew Strydom

Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman

In the summer of 1972, during a compulsory stint in the South African military, Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman heard the music that would forever change his life. A decade later, on yet another military base, Craig Bartholomew Strydom heard the same music. It would have a profound effect. Who was this folk singer who resonated with South Africa's youth? No one could say. All that anyone knew was his name - Rodriguez - and the fact that he had killed himself on stage after reading his own epitaph. 
 
After many years of searching in a pre-internet age, Strydom with support from Segerman found the musician not dead but alive and living in seclusion in Detroit. Even more remarkable was the fact that Rodriguez, no longer working as a musician and struggling to eke out a blue-collar existence, had no idea that he had been famous for over 25 years in a remote part of the world...

Sugar Man

The Life, Death and Resurrection of Sixto Rodriguez

John Man

Saladin 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.

Saladin

The Life, the Legend and the Islamic Empire

Dan Waddell

Adolf Hitler despised cricket, considering it un-German and decadent. And Berlin in 1937 was not a time to be going against the Fuhrer’s wishes. But hot on the heels of the 1936 Olympics, an enterprising cricket fanatic of enormous bravery, Felix Menzel, somehow persuaded his Nazi leaders to invite an English team to play his motley band of part-timers. 
 
That team was the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, an ill-matched group of mavericks, minor nobility, ex-county cricketers, rich businessmen and callow schoolboys – led by former Worcestershire CC skipper Major Maurice Jewell. Ordered ‘not to lose’ by the MCC, Jewell and his men entered the 'Garden of Beasts' to play two unofficial Test matches against Germany. 
 
Against a backdrop of repression, brutality and sporadic gunfire, the Gents battled searing August heat, matting pitches, the skill and cunning of Menzel, and opponents who didn't always adhere to the laws and spirit of the game. The tour culminated in a match at the very stadium which a year before had witnessed one of sport's greatest spectacles and a sinister public display of Nazi might. 
 
Despite the shadow cast by the cataclysmic conflict that was shortly to engulf them, Dan Waddell's vivid and detailed account of the Gentlemen of Worcestershire's 1937 Berlin tour is a story of triumph: of civility over barbarity, of passion over indifference and hope over despair.

Field of Shadows

The English Cricket Tour of Nazi Germany 1937

Wes Davis

In the bleakest years of the Second World War when it appeared that nothing could slow the advance of the German army, Hitler set his sights on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the ideal staging ground for domination of the Middle East. But German command had not counted on the strength of the Cretan resistance or the eccentric band of British intelligence officers who would stand in their way, conducting audacious sabotage operations in the very shadow of the Nazi occupation force. 
 
The Ariadne Objective tells the remarkable story of the secret war on Crete from the perspective of these amateur soldiers who found themselves serving because, as one of them put it, they had made 'the obsolete choice of Greek at school'. John Pendlebury, a swashbuckling archaeologist with a glass eye and a swordstick; Xan Fielding, a writer who would later produce the English translations of books like Bridge on the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes; Sandy Rendel, a future Times reporter, who prided himself on a disguise that left him looking more ragged and fierce than the Cretans he fought alongside; and Patrick Leigh Fermor, the future travel-writing luminary who, as a teenager in the early 1930s, walked across Europe, a continent already beginning to feel the effects of Hitler's rise to power. 
 
Having infiltrated occupied Crete, these British gentleman spies teamed with Cretan partisans to carry out a cunning plan to disrupt Nazi manoeuvres, culminating in a daring, high-risk plot to abduct the island’s German commander. In this thrilling and little known episode of Second World War history, Wes Davis paints a brilliant portrait of some extraordinary characters and tells a story of triumph against all the odds.

The Ariadne Objective

Patrick Leigh Fermor and the Underground War to Rescue Crete from the Nazis

Genghis Khan is one of history's immortals: a leader of genius, driven by an inspiring vision for peaceful world rule. Believing he was divinely protected, Genghis united warring clans to create a nation and then an empire that ran across much of Asia. 
 
Under his grandson, Kublai Khan, the vision evolved into a more complex religious ideology, justifying further expansion. Kublai doubled the empire's size until, in the late 13th century, he and the rest of Genghis’s ‘Golden Family’ controlled one fifth of the inhabited world. Along the way, he conquered all China, gave the nation the borders it has today, and then, finally, discovered the limits to growth. 
 
Genghis's dream of world rule turned out to be a fantasy. And yet, in terms of the sheer scale of the conquests, never has a vision and the character of one man had such an effect on the world. 
 
Charting the evolution of this vision, John Man provides a unique account of the Mongol Empire, from young Genghis to old Kublai, from a rejected teenager to the world’s most powerful emperor.

The Mongol Empire

Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China

Richard Guilliatt

Peter Hohnen

In the years 1916-1918, the Wolf, an ordinary freighter fitted-out with a hidden arsenal of weapons, was sent by Germany on one of the most daring clandestine naval missions of modern times. Under the command of Kapitan Karl Nerger, the ship undertook a continuous fifteen-month cruise in which she traversed three of the world's major oceans, destroyed more than thirty Allied vessels and captured over 400 men, women and children. During this time the Wolf maintained radio silence and never pulled into port, surviving on fuel and food plundered from captured ships. Equipped with the era's newest technological marvels the Wolf was an instrument of terror in a new age of mechanised warfare. 
 
In The Wolf, Richard Guilliatt &amp; Peter Hohnen bring this little-known story to life by drawing on dozens of eyewitness accounts, unpublished memoirs, declassified government files, newspaper reports and family archives unearthed during three years of intensive research in several countries. What emerges from these accounts is a richly-detailed picture of the world through which the Wolf moved, with all its social divisions and naked xenophobia, its spirit of bravery and stoicism, its paradoxical combination of old-world social mores and rapid technological change. 
 
This extraordinary adventure story exhibits the tremendous impact that one lone, audacious German warship made on the people of many nations during the final two years of the First World War.

The Wolf

A classic adventure story of how one ship took on the navies of the world in the First World War

David Hall

In the early 1950s Britain was still the most urbanized and industrialized nation in the world, a global power in shipbuilding and the leading European producer of coal, steel, cars and textiles. For the many millions of men and women hard at work during that time, an infernal landscape of smoke-blackened factories, towering slag heaps and fiery furnaces dominated their lives. From the deep docks and towering cranes of the Tyneside shipyards to the mills and chimneys of Lancashire and beyond, Working Lives takes us right to the heart of those industrial centres through the words of those who were there. 
 
Drawn together from hundreds of hours of first-hand interviews, Working Lives is a unique collection of oral testimonies from workers whose stories might not otherwise have been told: mill girls who risked life and limb in dusty, noisy weaving sheds; steel workers who wrestled sheets of white-hot metal in the blistering heat of the foundries; and miners who hewed coal by hand on filthy, cramped, claustrophobic coalfaces. 
 
Local industries shaped these workers’ entire lives but also gave them a sense of pride, identity and belonging. As they look back on the dangers and hardships of their jobs, and the place of industry in their close-knit communities, these fascinating voices paint a vivid and moving portrait of working life in Britain not to be forgotten.

Working Lives

Rorke Denver

**THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
With all the SEALs' recent successes, we have been getting a level of attention we are not used to. It's been flattering but something important has been missing from the discussion. People keep describing what we do, but no one has even scratched the surface of how and why. The unique psychology behind it. 
 
Operating in the world’s most hostile environments, the Navy SEALs are highly skilled warriors, finely tuned and ready for action. Now, for the first time, Lieutenant Commander Rorke Denver offers a compelling and profound insight into the extreme bravery, borderline lunacy, and touching camaraderie of this elite brotherhood. 
 
Packed with tales from the gruelling training process and real-life operations, Rorke Denver recounts his evolution from a young SEAL hopeful pushing his way through Hell Week, into a warrior engaging in dangerous stealth missions across the globe, and finally into a lieutenant commander directing the indoctrination programmes and the “Hero or Zero” missions his graduating SEALs undertake. 
 
From hunting Osama bin Laden to hostage rescues in Somalia and momentum-shifting operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the SEALs hit hard and fast, moving in and out of conflict zones without leaving a trace. 
 
Through the course of Denver’s story, you’ll see what it takes to become one of them and why they are the damn few.

Damn Few

Making the Modern SEAL Warrior

Robin Harris

The history of the Conservative party has, extraordinarily, rarely been written in a single volume for the general reader. There are academic multi-volume accounts and a multitude of smaller books with limited historical scope. But now, Robin Harris, Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter and party insider, has produced this authoritative but lively history book which tells the whole story and fills a gaping hole in Britain's historiographical record. 
 
Taking as his starting point the larger than life personalities of the Conservative Party's leaders and prime ministers since its inception, Robin Harris's book also analyses the interconnected themes and issues which have dominated Conservative politics over the years. The careers of Peel, Disraeli, Salisbury, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher, Major, Hague and Cameron together amount to an alternative history of Britain since the early nineteenth century. 
 
This landmark book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in history or politics, or anyone who has ever wondered how Britain came to be the nation it is today.

The Conservatives - A History

James Holland

The night of May 16th, 1943. Nineteen specially adapted Lancaster bombers take off from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, each with a huge 9,000lb cylindrical bomb strapped underneath it. Their mission: to destroy three dams deep within the German heartland, which provide the lifeblood to the industries supplying the Third Reich's war machine. 
 
From the outset it was an almost impossible task, a suicide mission: to fly low and at night in formationover many miles of enemy-occupied territory at the very limit of the Lancasters' capacity, and drop a new weapon that had never been tried operationally before from a precise height of just sixty feet from the water at some of the most heavily defended targets in Germany. 
 
More than that, the entire operation had to be put together in less than ten weeks. When visionary aviation engineer Barnes Wallis's concept of the bouncing bomb was green lighted, he hadn't even drawn up his plans for the weapon that was to smash the dams. What followed was an incredible race against time, which, despite numerous setbacks and against huge odds, became one of the most successful and game-changing bombing raids of all time.

Dam Busters

The Race to Smash the Dams, 1943

The Ninjas today are the stuff of myth and legend in comics, film and electronic games. But once they were real, the medieval equivalent of the SAS: spies, saboteurs, assassins. In their secrecy, under-cover skills and determination to survive, they were the opposite of the overt, self destructive samurai. Could they fly? Make themselves invisible? Of course not.It was just that their skills gave them a magical aura. As a result, martial artists and story-tellers have turned them into fantasy creatures, from James Bond to Mutant Turtles. 
 
In Ninja John Man goes in search of the truth. In a journey to the heartland of the ninjas, he takes us from their origins over 1,000 years ago, through their heyday in the civil wars that ended with Japan’s unification in 1600. But that was not the end of the ninja ethos. That re-emerged in World War Two as a little-known counterpart to Japanese militarism. Ninja ways live on in the real ‘last of the ninjas’, Hiroo Onoda, who held out in the Philippine jungle for 30 years.

Ninja

Tom Abraham

Tom 'Bud' Abraham was one of the very few Englishmen to serve in Vietnam. As an officer in the 1st Cavalry Division during 1967/8, he saw combat in some of the fiercest encounters of the war. His gallantry earned him a chestful of medals, including the Silver Star, one of the highest decorations awarded by the American Army. 
 
During the Tet Offensive, Tom was captured by the Vietcong. The suffering he endured during his interrogation and torture tested him to the limits, and yet his daring escape into the surrounding jungle was the beginning of a new ordeal. His struggle to survive, naked and alone, would drag him down to the level of a primitive beast. 
 
After he returned to England from Vietnam, Tom made a new life. He married, became a father, and started a successful career in business. It seemed that he had forgotten the nightmare of the past. But more than thirty years later, a trivial encounter with the police began a catastrophic chain of events. He lost everything - his family, his home, his self-respect. It became all too obvious that the psychological and emotional wounds he received in Vietnam were still festering. 
 
In trying to rebuild his life, Tom had once more to confront those traumatic memories that he had buried so deep. If he were to have any chance of a future, he would have to relive the past. His terrifying yet inspiring journey is the story of this book.

The Cage

Andy McNab

Abandoned as a baby, Andy McNab's start in life was tough. Growing up in South London with foster parents, and surrounded by poverty, he attended seven schools in as many years, disillusioned and in remedial classes. It wasn’t long before his life descended into petty crime. By the age of sixteen, he was in juvenile detention. 
 
Recruited into the Army from there, it soon became apparent that he had the reading age of an eleven year old. The next six months in the Army education system changed his course of his life forever. Today Everything Changes is the inspiring story of when life changed for Andy McNab.

Today Everything Changes

Quick Read

James Carnac

This memoir was recently discovered and appears to have been written in the 1920s by somone who asserts that he was Jack the Ripper. 
 
This person is James Carnac, this memoir written shortly before his death is an account of his entire life, including a few short months in 1888 when he became the murderer known to posterity as Jack the Ripper. 
 
This book introduces a new suspect for the infamous murders in Whitechapel in 1888. There is information in this book that does not appear to be derived from contemporary newspapers or any other publications and the descriptions of Tottenham in the 1870s, the visits to performances of Jekyll and Hyde, the intricate geography of Whitechapel in 1888 are written with pin-point accuracy. There is also a credible motive given for James becoming the murderer Jack and also a reason for the end of the murders. Given the fact that the author also appear to have knowledge about aspects of the case not in the public arena at the time it could be that this actually is the autobiography of Jack the Ripper. 
 
Ultimately it is up to the reader to decide if they believe the mystery has been solved at last but even if they end up deciding the account to be a work of fiction it would still be one of the very earliest imaginings of the Ripper case, written in the early years of the twentieth century, a fascinating piece of period writing and a worthy addition to the Ripper canon. 
 
Whatever side they come down on there is no question that this book will be a source of much debate.

The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper

Mary Main

Maria Eva Duarte de Peron was born in poverty in 1919 and died of cancer in 1952, at the age of 33, the richest and most powerful woman in Argentina. Her story is one of the most fantastic in history. Driven by a compelling ambition, she made her way to Buenos Aires and set about becoming an actress. In a very short time she had climbed to the top of Argentina's military-social ladder until at last she met Colonel Juan Peron -and her climb took a new direction. 
 
Here is the story of 'Evita' and how her rise to power became an almost unbelievable account of intrigue, bloodshed, and pure chicanery. Her multimillion-dollar tour of Europe; her setting up of the Eva Peron Foundation whereby she cornered the market on clothes, toys, books, groceries, imported drugs, medical equipment, and housing; her impassioned campaign speeches; her shameless flaunting of jewels and clothes in the very faces of her worshipping 'shirtless ones' - these are but a few of the facets of her incredible career that are described in detail. 
 
There was a fatal fascination about Eva Peron that remains, even after her death - an aura of evil that has become a legend.

Evita: The Woman With The Whip

Anthony Summers

Robbyn Swan

Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan have written the definitive account of 9/11. The shockwaves of the September 11, 2001 attacks in America reverberate to this day. Though Osama Bin Laden has been killed, questions remain. What exactly happened? Could 9/11 have been prevented? How and why did so much acrimony and misinformation arise from the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a quiet field in Pennsylvania? And what has yet to be revealed? 
 
The Eleventh Day, written with access to thousands of recently released official documents, is updated for this edition – and reports on a development which the former chairman of Congress' 9/11 probe describes as the ‘most important in years’.

The Eleventh Day

Sterling Seagrave

Be so subtle that you are invisible. Be so mysterious that you are intangible. Then you will control your rivals's fate' 
Sun Tzu, from The Art of War 
 
A community of fifty five million expatriates. Up to two trillion dollars in assets. A highly integrated interconnected network of influence and favour. A firm base on the Pacific Rim. Ambitions to influence the West. Imagine the potential power of such an organisation. You don't have to. This is the Overseas Chinese. 
 
Sterling Seagrave's brilliant new book, Lords of the Rim, uncovers a complex web of operations which already dominates the Far East and which is already making inroads into the West. It is a superbly researched and spectacularly told account of an extraordinary phenomenon, telling just who the Overseas Chinese are and how they became so powerful. Spanning thousands of years it encompasses stories of murder and betrayal, bravery and corruption; of triads, syndicates, kingmakers, merchants, emperors, generals, spies and pirates. 
 
In telling this masterful and entertaining history, Seagrave provides the reader with a cautionary tale: that Chinese strategies so effective for centuries are just as succesful today.

Lords Of The Rim

Matt Gallagher

Iraq, late 2007. Lieutenant Matt Gallagher arrives just as US policy shifts from lethal operations to counter-insurgency. He encounters a world where nothing is as it seems. Friends are enemies, reconciliation is war, roads are bombs and silence is deadly. Nothing left to do except 'embrace the suck'... 
 
...and blog about it. Matt Gallagher's response was to write an on-line journal (called Kaboom) which quickly went viral. Read by thousands of soldiers who recognised its unflinchingly honest portrayal of the real war, as well as high-ranking Pentagon officials and interested parties around the world, Kaboom was shut down by the US Army in June 2008. Now you can read the whole story, based on that brilliant, acerbic, banned blog. Kaboom paints a shockingly original and uncompromising portrait of a savage war the world is still struggling to understand.

Kaboom

Mike Rossiter

Operation Market Garden: a plan to capture the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem and outflank the German front. 
 
In all twelve thousand airborne troops were to land, either by parachute or glider, at three drop zones and move towards their objective. As the world now knows the mission was to be 'a bridge too far' for the British forces. 
 
Mike Rossiter has interviewed three of the survivors of those fateful days, each involved in a different flank of the British attack, and in vivid detail reconstructs the events that lead up to this most famous of glorious defeats. It is at once a story of hubris and bad planning, but also of valiant sacrifice and inspirational courage.

We Fought at Arnhem

Rowland White

It was to be one of the most ambitious operations since 617 Squadron bounced their revolutionary bombs into the dams of the Ruhr Valley in 1943 . . . 
 
April 1982. Argentine forces had invaded the Falkland Islands. Britain needed an answer. And fast. 
 
The idea was simple: to destroy the vital landing strip at Port Stanley. The reality was more complicated. The only aircraft that could possibly do the job was three months from being scrapped, and the distance it had to travel was four thousand miles beyond its maximum range. It would take fifteen Victor tankers and seventeen separate in-flight refuellings to get one Avro Vulcan B2 over the target, and give its crew any chance of coming back alive. 
 
Yet less than a month later, a formation of elderly British jets launched from a remote island airbase to carry out the longest-range air attack in history. At its head was a single aircraft, six men, and twenty-one thousand-pound bombs, facing the hornet’s nest of modern weaponry defending the Argentine forces on the Falkland Islands. There would be no second chances . . .

Vulcan 607

Diana Preston

Michael Preston

In 1631, the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, ordered the construction of a monument of unsurpassed splendour and majesty in memory of his beloved wife. Theirs was an extraordinary story of passionate love: although almost constantly pregnant - she bore him fourteen children - Mumtaz Mahal followed her husband on every military campaign.But then Mumtaz died in childbirth. Blinded by grief, Shah Jahan created an exquisite and extravagant memorial for her on the banks of the river Jumna. The Taj Mahal took twenty years to build and depleted the Moghul treasuries.But Shah Jahan was to pay a greater price for his obsession. He ended his days imprisoned by his own son in Agra Fort, gazing across the river at the monument to his love. The building of the Taj Mahal had set brother against brother and son against father in a savage conflict that pushed the seventeenth century's most powerful empire into irreversible decline.

A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time

The Story of the Taj Mahal

Christabel Bielenberg

Brought together for the first time in one edition, both of Christabel Bielenberg's bestselling memoirs give an incredibly moving, emotionally charged and compelling insight into life in Nazi Germany during The Third Reich and during the aftermath of World War Two. Offering a new perspective, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the wartime era. 
 
'This is one of the best WWII books I have ever read' -- ***** Reader review 
'An excellent book and a must-read for anyone interested in this era' -- ***** Reader review 
'Absorbing' -- ***** Reader review 
'Intensely moving' -- ***** Reader review 
'A wonderful book. I couldn't put it down' -- ***** Reader review 
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The Past is Myself 
 Christabel Bielenberg, a niece of newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, married a German lawyer in 1934. She lived through the war in Germany, as a German citizen under the horrors of Nazi rule and Allied bombings. The Past is Myself is her story of that experience - and an unforgettable portrait of an evil time. 
 
 The Road Ahead 
 Following the extraordinary success of her wartime memoir, The Past is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg received thousands of letters from readers begging her to describe what happened next. In The Road Ahead she continues her story with the outbreak of peace - a time of struggle for reconciliation with, and the rebuilding of, a defeated nation. She also tells of life in her newly adopted country, Ireland, her involvement with the Peace Women of Northern Ireland, and with characteristic modesty and gratitude, looks back on a rich, full life. 
 
Anyone interested in the Second World War and life in the 1930s and 1940s will devour these unflinchingly honest and enthralling memoirs, published together in one edition for the first time.

The Past is Myself & The Road Ahead Omnibus

When I Was a German, 1934-1945: omnibus edition of two bestselling wartime memoirs that depict life in Nazi Germany with alarming honesty

Malcolm McPherson

Their mission was straightforward - to set up an Al Qaeda observation post in the south-eastern mountains of Afghanistan. No-one was expecting any difficulties. 
 
Instead three men - a Navy SEAL, an Air Force Combat Air Controller and an Army Ranger platoon commander - were pinned down by hostile fire on top of Takur Ghat mountain. Only one of them survived to recall the horrors of what became a truly terrible day . . . The resulting rescue mission turned into a seventeen hour battle that left seven soldiers dead. 
 
Roberts Ridge is the visceral story of those seventeen hours. With access to Pentagon generals, the SEALS and the survivors, Malcolm MacPherson takes the reader deep into the heart of the battle of Takur Ghat and brings us face to face with the reality of the new war against terrorism.

Roberts Ridge

‘A notable account of an epic human experience' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 
 
‘Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war’ Sir Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, 18 June 1940 
 
The Nazi Blitzkrieg was unlike any invasion the world had ever seen. It hit Europe with a force and aggression that no-one could counter. Within weeks the German armies were at the French coast and looking across at Britain. It seemed impossible that she would be able to resist invasion. 
 
Between the Nazis and glory stood an apparently fragile defence, but the men and women of Fighter, Bomber and Coastal Commands and the Royal Navy would not be cowed. Their heroics that summer would go down in history. 
 
In The Battle of Britain for the first time, James Holland tells this most epic of stories from a 360° perspective – when the fate of the world truly hung by a thread.

The Battle of Britain

Richard Dannatt

General Sir Richard Dannatt's distinguished career in the army has spanned thirty-eight years and seen him serve in many different theatres of conflict, from Northern Ireland (where he was awarded the Military Cross) to Bosnia and Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. His experiences have forged an unwavering loyalty to the fighting British soldier. 
 
As Chief of the General Staff, he was given overall command of the British army at a time when the fighting was fiercest in Afghanistan. But from his very first day in the job, General Dannatt proved himself a courageous leader and a forceful advocate for his men, never shying from controversy to tell the truth as he found it. 
 
More than any leader in recent times, Dannatt has used his position of command to get a better deal for the British soldier - the right equipment, the right conditions, the right reward - to do the job we ask of them. His leadership and example have shaped the debate about the role of the professional army in modern warfare. 
 
Leading from the Front is General Sir Richard Dannatt's reflections on a life of military service which offers a characteristically frank analysis of whether Britain's defence strategy is fit to deal with the numerous threats we will face in the 21st century.

Leading from the Front

An autobiography

James Fergusson

Southern Afghanistan in the early 1990s was in even greater chaos than it is now. The Russians, who had occupied the country throughout the 1980s, were long gone. The disparate ethnic and religious leaders who had united to eject the invaders - the famous mujaheddin - were at each others' throats. For the rural poor of Kandahar province, life was almost impossible. 
 
On 12 October 1994 a small group of religious students decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by an illiterate village mullah with one eye, some 200 of them surrounded and took Spin Boldak, a trucking stop on the border with Pakistan. From this short and unremarkable border skirmish, a legend was born. The students' numbers swelled as news of their triumph spread. The Taliban, as they now called themselves - taliban is the plural of talib, literally 'one who seeks knowledge' - had a simple mission statement: the disarmament of the population, and the establishment of a theocracy based on Sharia law. They fought with a religious zeal that the warring mujaheddin could not match. 
 
By February 1995, this people's revolt had become a national movement; 18 months later Kabul fell, and the country was effectively theirs. James Fergusson's fascinating account of this extraordinary story is be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand the situation in Afghanistan, now and for the future...

Taliban

the history of the world’s most feared fighting force

Margaret Humphreys

THE BOOK THAT EXPOSED THE HEARTBREAKING SCANDAL OF BRITAIN'S FORGOTTEN AND ABUSED CHILD MIGRANTS - now a film, Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson. 
In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire, right up until as recently as 1970. 
 
Many were told that their parents were dead, and parents were told that their children had been adopted. In fact, for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. Margaret and her team reunited thousands of families before it was too late, brought authorities to account, and worldwide attention to an outrageous miscarriage of justice.

Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

'We believed in ourselves so much, no one ever panicked, even when the situation looked so desperate. We all believed that our best chance of staying alive was to stick together.' 
 
Flying Lancaster bombers was one of the most dangerous missions of the war. Yet night after night Flight Lieutenant Geoffrey King and the crew of C Charlie risked their lives in the skies over Germany. Together they faced incredible dangers, flak damage, close encounters with the fighter planes of the Luftwaffe, and crash landings. 
 
Against this background a friendship was formed that bound the crew of C Charlie together against all odds. 
 
Geoffrey King and the crew of C Charlie are unique in having flown together for fifty missions and living to tell the tale. Bomber Flight Berlin is the story of a group of ordinary men, from different walks of life, thrown together by the forces of war. It is the story of those missions above Berlin, as they flew into what seemed certain death, and aircraft all around them were blasted out of the sky. It is also a testament to a remarkable friendship.

Bomber Flight Berlin

Following the extraordinary success of her wartime memoirs, The Past Is Myself, Christabel Bielenberg received thousands of letters from readers begging her to describe what happened next. The Road Ahead takes up the story at the moment the first volume left off - with the outbreak of peace. 
 
Germany was devastated by war and its aftermath, while Britain seemed grey and exhausted to Christabel. She was soon appointed the Observer's special correspondent in Germany, and, reunited with her husband, Peter (technically an enemy alien), she joined the struggle for reconciliation with, and the rebuilding of, a defeated nation. It was Peter's near-fatal accident and her own illness which decided the young couple to turn their backs on England and Germany and make a new start farming in Ireland. 
 
Life was harsh at first, but predictably Christabel found humour in the accidents of poverty and the many mishaps of country life. The beautiful scenery of the Wicklow Mountains provided a haven for the family and for the hosts of young people from all over the world who joined them each summer. Christabel became involved with the Peace Women of Northern Ireland and learned as much as she could about the adopted country she had grown to love so passionately. Taking her seventieth birthday as a stopping point for a life that even now, some fourteen further years on, is as rich and full as it ever was, she looks back with characteristic modesty and gratitude. Her readers will be enchanted by this second volume of memoirs, as clear-sighted and generous, as honest, funny, touching and brave as The Past Is Myself.

The Road Ahead

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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