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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

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

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Andy McNab

Sergeant Andy McNab recounts the story of the top secret mission that would reveal the secrets of the SAS to the world for the first time. 
 
Their location: Iraq 
Their mission: to sever a vital enemy underground communication link, to find and destroy mobile Scud launchers 
Their call sign: Bravo Two Zero 
 
When eight members of the elite SAS regiment embark on a highly covert operation, they are each laden with 15 stones of equipment, needing to tab 20km across the desert to reach their objective. But within days, their location is compromised. They engage in a fierce battle. They escape on foot to the Syrian border. Three men die. One escapes. 
But four men are captured. For them, the worst is yet to come. Delivered to Baghdad, they are tortured with a savagery for which not even their intensive SAS training has prepared them… 
 
This is a story of superhuman courage, strength, endurance and dark humour in the face of overwhelming odds. It shows just how much it takes to be a member of the SAS. 
_____________________________________________ 
‘The best account yet of the SAS in action’ Sunday Times 
‘One of the best books to emerge from the first Gulf War … Magnificent’ Independent on Sunday

Bravo Two Zero

The original SAS story

the classic true story from an SAS hero

John Man

'Man does for the reader that most difficult of tasks: he conjures up an ancient people in an alien landscape in such a way as to make them live.' - Guardian 
 
The people of the first nomadic empire left no written records, but from 200 BC they dominated the heart of Asia for 400 years. They changed the world. The Mongols, today’s descendants of Genghis Khan, see them as ancestors. Their rise cemented Chinese unity and inspired the first Great Wall. Their heirs under Attila the Hun helped destroy the Roman Empire. 
 
We don’t know what language they spoke, but they became known as Xiongnu, or Hunnu, a term passed down the centuries and across Eurasia, enduring today in shortened form as ‘Hun’. Outside Asia precious little is known of their rich history, but new evidence reframes our understanding of the indelible mark they left on a vast region stretching from Europe and sweeping right across Central Asia deep into China. 
 
Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, Barbarians at the Wall traces their epic story, and shows how the nomadic cultures of the steppes gave birth to a ‘barbarian empire’ with the wealth and power to threaten the civilised order of the ancient world.

Barbarians at the Wall

The First Nomadic Empire and the Making of China

Since the time of the ancient Greeks we have been fascinated by accounts of the Amazons, an elusive tribe of hard-fighting, horse-riding female warriors. Equal to men in battle, legends claimed they cut off their right breasts to improve their archery skills and routinely killed their male children to purify their ranks. 
 
For centuries people believed in their existence and attempted to trace their origins. Artists and poets celebrated their battles and wrote of Amazonia. Spanish explorers, carrying these tales to South America, thought they lived in the forests of the world’s greatest river, and named it after them. 
 
In the absence of evidence, we eventually reasoned away their existence, concluding that these powerful, sexually liberated female soldiers must have been the fantastical invention of Greek myth and storytelling. Until now. 
 
Following decades of new research and a series of groundbreaking archeological discoveries, we now know these powerful warrior queens did indeed exist. In Amazons, John Man travels to the grasslands of Central Asia, from the edge of the ancient Greek world to the borderlands of China, to discover the truth about the warrior women mythologized as Amazons. 
 
In this deeply researched, sweeping historical epic, Man redefines our understanding of the Amazons and their culture, tracking the ancient legend into the modern world and examining its significance today.

Amazons

The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World

John Nixon

A riveting, revealing and news-making account of the CIA's interrogation of Saddam, written by the CIA agent who conducted the questioning. 
 
 In December 2003, after one of the largest, most aggressive manhunts in history, US military forces captured Iraqi president Saddam Hussein near his hometown of Tikrit. Beset by body-double rumors and false alarms during a nine-month search, the Bush administration needed positive identification of the prisoner before it could make the announcement that would rocket around the world. 
 At the time, John Nixon was a senior CIA leadership analyst who had spent years studying the Iraqi dictator. Called upon to make the official ID, Nixon looked for telltale scars and tribal tattoos and asked Hussein a list of questions only he could answer. The man was indeed Saddam Hussein, but as Nixon learned in the ensuing weeks, both he and America had greatly misunderstood just who Saddam Hussein really was. 
 Debriefing the President presents an astounding, candid portrait of one of our era’s most notorious strongmen. Nixon, the first man to conduct a prolonged interrogation of Hussein after his capture, offers expert insight into the history and mind of America’s most enigmatic enemy. After years of parsing Hussein’s leadership from afar, Nixon faithfully recounts his debriefing sessions and subsequently strips away the mythology surrounding an equally brutal and complex man. His account is not an apology, but a sobering examination of how preconceived ideas led Washington policymakers—and Tony Blair's government —astray. Unflinching and unprecedented, Debriefing the President exposes a fundamental misreading of one of the modern world’s most central figures and presents a new narrative that boldly counters the received account.

Debriefing the President

The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein

James Holland

'A thrilling blow-by-blow account' The Times 
'A first-rate popular history of a fascinating and neglected battle... a veritable page-turner' BBC History 
 
In February 1944, a rag-tag collection of clerks, drivers, doctors, muleteers, and other base troops, stiffened by a few dogged Yorkshiremen and a handful of tank crews managed to hold out against some of the finest infantry in the Japanese Army, and then defeat them in what was one of the most astonishing battles of the Second World War. 
 
What became know as The Defence of the Admin Box, fought amongst the paddy fields and jungle of Northern Arakan over a fifteen-day period, turned the battle for Burma. Not only was it the first decisive victory for British troops against the Japanese, more significantly, it demonstrated how the Japanese could be defeated. The lessons learned in this tiny and otherwise insignificant corner of the Far East, set up the campaign in Burma that would follow, as General Slim's Fourteenth Army finally turned defeat into victory. 
 
Burma '44 is a tale of incredible drama. As gripping as the story of Rorke's drift, as momentous as the battle for the Ardennes, the Admin Box was a triumph of human grit and heroism and remains one of the most significant yet undervalued conflicts of World War Two. 
 
The new, sweeping World War II book from James Holland, THE SAVAGE STORM, is available now.

Burma '44

The Battle That Turned Britain's War in the East

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

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

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

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

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

Spoken from the Front is the story of the Afghan Campaign, told for the first time in the words of the servicemen and women who have been fighting there. With unprecedented access to soldiers of all ranks, as well as pilots, reservists, engineers, medics, Royal Military police, mechanics, cooks and other military personnel, Andy McNab has assembled a portrait of modern conflict like never before. 
 
This is the full experience of our troops on the ground and in the air. The horrors, cruelties, drudgery, excitement and banter of these soldiers' lives combine to form a chronological narrative of all the major events in Helmand during the British Army's time there. 
 
From their action-packed, dramatic, moving and often humorous testimonies in interviews, diaries, letters and emails written to family, friends and loved ones, emerges a 360-degree picture of guerrilla warfare up close and extremely personal. It is as close to the real thing as you can get.

Spoken From The Front

Mike Rossiter

In the dead of night on 20 March 2003, Royal Navy Marines from 40 and 42 Commando board a fleet of twenty helicopters. With faces blackened and mouths dry at the thought of what lies ahead, they have been given the job of capturing the oil pipelines and pumping stations through which 90 per cent of Iraq's oil is exported, to seal off the whole of the Faw peninsula and hold it against any counter-attack by the Iraqi Army. They will be the first troops on the ground in Iraq, literally kicking the door down. They will also suffer the first allied casualties in the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. 
 
Operation Telic was a bold and audacious break with military doctrine, a night-time airborne assault against heavily defended positions. 
 
With the Commandos lightly armed and isolated, the night-time landing was just the beginning. They were engaged in a series of fast-moving and hard-fought battles as they moved rapidly north until they reached the outskirts of Basra. 
 
Finally, after a two-day battle that broke the back of the Iraqi resistance, and eighteen days after their first contact with the enemy, Royal Marine Commandos entered the presidential palace in Basra. 
 
Told from the perspective, and with the cooperation of officers and men in the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines, Target Basra is a story of courage, fortitude and the harsh realities of modern war, fought in the context of the turmoil of the Middle East.

Target Basra

Lewis Alsamari

Aged 17, Lewis Alsamari was conscripted into the Iraqi army. Things went from bad to worse once his superiors discovered his ability to speak English, and Lewis was selected for Saddam's elite, top secret intelligence service, an offer he literally could not refuse. This left him with only one option - to escape from his native land, leaving his family behind him... 
 
Going under the wire of the army compound where he was posted, Lewis was shot in the leg, making his escape - which required a gruelling journey in disguise across the desert at night with a group of Bedouin, at the mercy of ravenous wolves - all the more arduous. Against the odds, Lewis survived this trek, made it across the border into Jordan, and eventually sought asylum the UK, where he had spent his childhood. 
 
Now he had to work out how to rescue his mother, brother and sister, who had been apprehended by security forces and thrown into jail once Lewis's escape became known. The only thing which could help was money and lots of it, so Lewis fraudulently transferred £37,000 from the accounts of William Hill (where he had a temporary job) into his own bank, and wired it to Baghdad in order to pay the necessary bribes. But, of course, it wasn't quite that simple... 
 
Out of Iraq is an exhilarating and terrifying story of one man's escape from one of the harshest regimes of the modern era. It is testament both to the strength of the human spirit and to the extremes we'll go to in order to keep our loved ones safe.

Out of Iraq

Sattareh Farman-Farmaian

Sattareh Farman Farmaian, the daughter of a once-powerful and wealthy Iranian prince, was raised and educated in the 1920s and 1930s in a Persian harem compound, along with numerous mothers and more than 30 brothers and sisters. As a young woman, she broke with Muslim tradition and travelled to America, where she became the first Persian to study at the University of Southern California. Her new life in the West fired a vision to lift her own people out of backwardness and poverty, and she returned to Iran to found the Tehran School of Social Work. For more than 20 years, Sattareh and her students waged a war against poverty, disease and overcrowding, and then, soon after the collapse of the Shah's regime, she was forced to flee the country in fear of her life. In this account of her experiences, she provides an insider's view of Iran's journey through the 20th century and of the events which led up to, and followed, the Islamic revolution.

Daughter Of Persia

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

A Dance to the Music of Time

A Fairy Tale Revolution

A Frank Grasby Mystery

A Guide For the Curious

A Horatio Hornblower Tale of the Sea

A Jo Birmingham Thriller

A Jon Roscoe Thriller

A Ladybird Book

A Ladybird Magic Windows Book

A Look Back at

A Luke Carlton Thriller

A Max Mingus Thriller

A Michael Bennett Thriller

A Midge McGowan Mystery

A Mitchum Thriller

A Moneybunny Book

A Murder Most Unladylike Collection

A Murder Most Unladylike Mini Mystery

A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery

A Nigel Strangeways Mystery

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