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Peter Moore

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER. An inventive biography of one of the most famous ships of all time – an alluring combination of history, adventure and science. 
 
‘HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR’ Christopher Hart, Sunday Times 
 
From Johnson’s Dictionary to campaigns for liberty, the Enlightenment was an age of endeavours. ‘Endeavour’ was also the name given to a commonplace, coal-carrying vessel bought by the Royal Navy in 1768 for an expedition to the South Seas. No one could have guessed that Endeavour would go on to become the most significant ship in the history of British exploration. 
 
Endeavour famously carried Captain James Cook on his first great voyage, but her complete story has never been told before. Here, Peter Moore sets out to explore the different lives of this remarkable ship – from the acorn that grew into the oak that made her, to her rich and complex legacy. 
 
‘Fascinating and richly detailed... Peter Moore has brought us an acute insight into the ship that carried some of the most successful explorers across the world. A fine book that’s definitely worth exploring’ MICHAEL PALIN

Endeavour

The Sunday Times bestselling biography of Captain Cook’s recently discovered ship

The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World

Peter Maas

On the eve of World War II, the Squalus, America's newest submarine, plunged to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Miraculously, thirty-three crew members still survived in the stricken vessel. While their loved ones waited in unbearable tension onshore, their ultimate fate would depend upon one man, US Navy officer Charles 'Swede' Momsen - an extraordinary combination of visionary, scientist and man of action. In this thrilling true story, prize-winning author Peter Maas vividly re-creates a moment-by-moment account of the disaster and the man at its centre. Could he actually pluck those men from a watery grave? Or had all his pioneering work been in vain?'Gripping' New York Times'A white knuckle read' Publishers Weekly

The Terrible Hours

Mark Kurlansky

When Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 in 1626 he showed his shrewdness by also buying the oyster beds off tiny, nearby Oyster Island, renamed Ellis Island in 1770. 
 
From the Minuit purchase until pollution finally destroyed the beds in the 1920s, New York was a city known for its oysters, especially in the late 1800s, when Europe and America enjoyed a decades-long oyster craze. In a dubious endorsement, William Makepeace Thackeray said that eating a New York oyster was like eating a baby. 
 
Travellers to New York were also keen to experience the famous New York oyster houses. While some were known for their elegance, due to a longstanding belief in the aphrodisiac quality of oysters, they were often associated with prostitution. In 1842, when the novelist Charles Dickens arrived in New York, he could not conceal his eagerness to find and experience the fabled oyster cellars of New York City's slums. 
 
The Big Oyster is the story of a city and of an international trade.Filled with cultural, social and culinary insight - as well as recipes, maps, drawings and photographs - this is history at its most engrossing, entertaining and delicious.

The Big Oyster

A Molluscular History of New York

Bestselling historian Peter Moore traces how Enlightenment ideas were exported from Britain and put into practice in America - where they became the most successful export of all time, the American Dream 
 
'Absorbing... fascinating... eloquent' THE TIMES 
'Engaging and thoroughly reader-friendly' TELEGRAPH 
'Wonderfully absorbing and stimulating' SARAH BAKEWELL 
 
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is frequently evoked today as shorthand for the American Dream. But this is a line with a surprising history. Rather than being uniquely American, the vision it encapsulates – of a free and happy world – owes a great deal to British thinkers too. 
 
Centred on the life of Benjamin Franklin, featuring figures like the cultural giant Samuel Johnson, the groundbreaking historian Catharine Macaulay, the firebrand politician and revolutionary activist Thomas Paine, this book looks at the generation that preceded the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It takes us back to a vital moment in the foundation of the West and tells a whole new story about the birth of the United States of America – and some of the key principles by which we live to this day. 
 
 
'Deft insights and in clear prose' ALAN TAYLOR 
'A gripping account' STELLA TILLYARD 
'Rollicking...compulsive readability' WASHINGTON POST 
'A great read' LADY HALE

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Britain and the American Dream (1740–1776)

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Endeavour

Eric Schlosser

Command and Control interweaves the minute-by-minute story of an accident at a missile silo in rural Arkansas, where a single crew struggled to prevent the explosion of the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States, with a historical narrative that spans more than fifty years. It depicts the urgent effort to ensure that nuclear weapons can't be stolen, sabotaged, used without permission, or detonated inadvertently. Schlosser also looks at the Cold War from a new perspective, offering history from the ground up, telling the stories of bomber pilots, missile commanders, maintenance crews, and other ordinary servicemen who risked their lives to avert a nuclear holocaust. Drawing on recently declassified documents and interviews with men who designed and routinely handled nuclear weapons, Command and Control takes readers into a terrifying but fascinating world that, until now, has been largely hidden from view.

Command and Control

Mário de Andrade

'My life's done a somersault,' wrote acclaimed modernist writer Mário de Andrade. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, he finally embarked on a three-month odyssey up the great river and into the wild heart of his native Brazil with a group of avant-garde luminaries. All abandoned ship but a socialite, her two nieces, and, of course, the author himself. And so begins the humorous account of Andrade's steamboat adventure into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. 
 
Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, his sarcastic, down-to-earth diary entries not only offer comedic and awe-inspiring details of life and the landscape but also trace his internal metamorphosis: his travels challenge what he thought he knew about the Amazon, and drastically alter his understanding of his motherland.

The Apprentice Tourist

Oliver Stone

Peter Kuznick

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick examine the dark side of American history from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the Obama administration. Looking at American intervention in foreign conflicts in Latin American, Asia and the Middle East, including taking part in covert operations and interfering to overthrow elected leaders in favour of right-wing dictators, they ask whether US involvement around the globe is about democratic ideals, or political and economic gain. 
 
From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the Watergate scandal and the transformation of America into a national security state, The Concise Untold History lays bare how US presidents have ignored the constitution and international law to influence the course of world events for the interest of the few. 
 
Based on the critically acclaimed documentary series of the same name, this book compellingly unmasks the shocking and unforgettable truth behind the American Empire.

The Concise Untold History of the United States

James Bradley

Ron Powers

In this remarkably powerful book, James Bradley takes as his starting point one of the most famous photographs of all time. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima and into a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire from 22,000 Japanese. After climbing through a hellish landscape and on to the island's highest peak, six men were photographed raising the stars and stripes. One of those soldiers was the author's father, John Bradley. He never spoke to his family about the photograph or about the war, but after his death in 1994, they discovered closed boxes of letters and photos which James Bradley draws on to retrace the lives of his father and his five companions. 
 
Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island - an island riddled with sixteen miles of tunnels and defended by Japanese soldiers determined to fight to the death. In the thirty-six days of fighting, almost fifty-thousand men lost their lives. 
 
Above all a human - and personal - story, few books have captured so brilliantly or so movingly the complexity of war and its aftermath and the true meaning of heroism.

Flags Of Our Fathers

John Rapley

Peter Heather

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in rapid decline. 
 
This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration - a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence. In Why Empires Fall, historian Peter Heather and political economist John Rapley use this Roman past to think anew about the contemporary West, its state of crisis, and what paths we could take out of it. 
 
In this exceptional, transformative intervention, Heather and Rapley explore the uncanny parallels - and productive differences - between the two cases, moving beyond the familiar tropes of invading barbarians and civilizational decay to learn new lessons from ancient history. From 399 to 1999, the life cycles of empires, they argue, sow the seeds of their inevitable destruction. The era of western global domination has reached its end - so what comes next?

Why Empires Fall

Rome, America and the Future of the West

Mark Levine

It was April 3, 1974 and the United States was in turmoil. Crime was soaring, unemployment and inflation were out of control, the Vietnam War had just come to a demoralising end and the soon-to-be-disgraced President Nixon was on his way out of office. Then, over a sixteen-hour period, nature stepped forward with its own display of mayhem, as an unprecedented outbreak of 148 tornadoes descended on the country. The destruction wrought was horrifying - hundreds killed, thousands of homes demolished, a billion dollars in losses sustained. 
 
Amidst this chaos, acclaimed journalist Mark Levine follows the devastating path of a twin set of F5s - the rarest, and most deadly, category of tornado, and their impact on a rich cast of intertwined characters. Ordinary lives are transformed in one bewildering, terrifying instant: a pair of teenage lovers caught while driving on a dark country road; a Vietnam veteran trapped at home with a newborn baby; a sheriff caught in the line of fire twice in rapid succession; a black preacher with a past of dire hardship struggling to protect his family. Other figures enter the story from the broader cultural scene: Hank Aaron, on his way to challenging baseball's home run record amid racist death threats; Patty Hearst, whose image as kidnapping victim is undergoing a radical shift; Richard Nixon, intent on using the storms for his political advantage; and a memorably eccentric scientist, known as Mr Tornado, who regards the 'Superoutbreak' as the apotheosis of his scholarly life. 
 
Monster Tornado provides a vivid and remarkable portrait of a unique point in American history - a time of incredible and unsettling convergence, where weather and people collided, and the fortunes of a series of characters, obscure and famous, would change forever.

Monster Tornado

The Incredible True Story of America's Most Devastating Twister

J. C. H. King

'A history of resilience ... sweeping, comprehensive ... it's a story that has been waiting to be told' Guardian 
 
'An account sorely needed ... a kaleidoscopic view of Native American history, refreshing and rollicking, and not unlike its fractured reality' Standpoint 
 
Blood and Land is a dazzling, panoramic account of the history and achievements of Native North Americans, and why they matter today. It is about why no understanding of the wider world is possible without comprehending the original inhabitants of the United States and Canada: Native Americans, First Nations and Arctic peoples. 
 
This highly personal book, based on years of travel and first-hand research in North America, introduces a deeply complex story, of myriad identities and determined ethnicities - from the desert Southwest to the high Arctic, from first contact between Europeans and Native Americans to the challenges of Native leadership today. Instead of writing a chronological history, King confronts the reader with the paradoxes, diversity and successes of Native North Americans. Their astonishing ingenuity and supple intelligence enabled, after centuries of suffering both violence and dispossession, a striking level of recovery, optimism and autonomy in the twenty-first century. 
 
Beautifully illustrated and filled with arresting and surprising stories, Blood and Land looks well beyond the 'feathers-and-failure' narratives beloved by historians to show us Native North America as it was and is.

Blood and Land

The Story of Native North America

Herbert Asbury

This classic history of crime tells how the Chicago underworld earned - and kept - its notorious reputation, from the time it was settled to the Prohibition days of the 1920s. Recounting the lives of such infamous early inhabitants as the original Mickey Finn and the mass murderer H. H. Holmes, it climaxes with the city's golden age of crime and a dramatic account of the careers of the biggest of the Big Shots - Big Jim Colosimo, Terrible Johnny Torrio, and the elusive Al Capone, revealing life as it was lived in the criminal districts and the infamous red light district where the brothels boasted opulence unheard of before or since. Rounded off with fascinating photographs and illustrations, this is one of the most detailed, reliable and readable accounts of the nether side of Chicago's first century.

The Gangs Of Chicago

Serhii Plokhy

For more than four weeks in the autumn of 1962 the world teetered. The consequences of a misplaced step during the Cuban Missile Crisis could not have been more grave. Ash and cinder, famine and fallout; nuclear war between the two most-powerful nations on Earth. 
 
In Nuclear Folly, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy tells the riveting story of those weeks, tracing the tortuous decision-making and calculated brinkmanship of John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and of their advisors and commanders on the ground. More often than not, Plokhy argues, the Americans and Soviets simply misread each other, operating under mutual distrust, second-guesses and false information. Despite all of this, nuclear disaster was avoided thanks to one very human reason: fear. 
 
Drawing on the impressive array of primary sources, including the recently declassified KGB files, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama of those tense days. Authoritative, fast-paced and unforgettable, this is the definitive new account of the Cold War's most perilous moment.

Nuclear Folly

A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis

George Packer

From one of America’s greatest non-fiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. 
 
**WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2019** 
**FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2020** 
 
Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed, and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage. He was the force behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars, America's greatest diplomatic achievement in the post-Cold War era. His power lay in an utter belief in himself and his idea of a muscular, generous foreign policy. But his sharp elbows and tireless self-promotion ensured that he never rose to the highest levels in government that he so desperately coveted. 
 
Holbrooke’s story is the story of the rise and fall of America during its era of supremacy: its strength, drive, and sense of possibility, as well as its penchant for overreach and heedless self-confidence. Drawing on Holbrooke’s diaries and papers, George Packer’s narrative is both intimate and epic in its revelatory portrait of this extraordinary and deeply flawed man, and the elite spheres of society and government he inhabited. 
 
A GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR

Our Man

Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

Rebecca Hall

Hugo Martinez

Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the passage across the Atlantic. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. 
 
In Wake Rebecca Hall, a historian, a granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery, tells their story. With in-depth archival research and a measured use of historical imagination, she constructs the likely pasts of women rebels who fought for freedom on slave ships bound to America, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. Beneath both is Hall's own tale: of a life lived in the shadow of slavery and its consequences. 
 
Strikingly illustrated in black and white, Wake explores both a personal and a global legacy. Part graphic novel, part memoir, it is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake. 
 
'Not only a riveting tale of Black women's leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery' - Angela Davis

Wake

The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

Erik Larson

'An irresistible page-turner that reads like the most compelling, sleep defying fiction' TIME OUT 
 
One was an architect. The other a serial killer. This is the incredible story of these two men and their realization of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and its amazing 'White City'; one of the wonders of the world. 
 
The architect was Daniel H. Burnham, the driving force behind the White City, the massive, visionary landscape of white buildings set in a wonderland of canals and gardens. 
 
The killer was H. H. Holmes, a handsome doctor with striking blue eyes. He used the attraction of the great fair - and his own devilish charms - to lure scores of young women to their deaths. 
 
While Burnham overcame politics, infighting, personality clashes and Chicago's infamous weather to transform the swamps of Jackson Park into the greatest show on Earth, Holmes built his own edifice just west of the fairground. He called it the World's Fair Hotel. 
 
In reality it was a torture palace, a gas chamber, a crematorium. 
 
These two disparate but driven men are brought to life in this mesmerizing, murderous tale of the legendary Fair that transformed America and set it on course for the twentieth century . . .

The Devil In The White City

Jon Hotten

Los Angeles, 1988. In a summer of hedonism, everyone wants their share. 
 
On Sunset Strip, undiscovered bands dream of emulating their heroes: Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, Poison and all the other chancers who got lucky... Above them in the canyons, the city’s privileged youth already live like rock stars. Drifting between these separate worlds is a journalist on the trail of stories that grow darker by the day: a rock star wannabe who may or may not be who he says he is, a guitar player who will do anything to succeed, crossing the line between reality and fantasy. 
 
Then comes beautiful Iris, distant Brenna, ambivalent Blair, Lana the singer - taking their chances, losing their way, doing whatever it takes… 
 
Set in the glory days when the music business was a vast and amoral empire where stardom seemed arbitrary and sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll were the lifestyle of choice, My Life and the Beautiful Music blurs memoir, myth and reality to recreate the last, lost era of a now-vanished world.

My Life And The Beautiful Music

Adrian Tinniswood

The Rainborowes bridges two generations and two worlds, weaving together the lives of the Rainborowe clan as they struggle to forge a better life for themselves and a better future for humankind in the New World. 
 
Starting with William Rainborowe, a prominent merchant-mariner and shipmaster, and his equally formidable sons and daughters between 1630 and 1660, we follow their astonishing story through the Civil War, the Putney debates, and settling in America. The Rainborowes explains America and mourns England’s failed revolution. It spans oceans and ideologies and encompasses personal tragedies and triumphs, the death of kings and the birth of nations. 
 
Using rare printed material from the period and unpublished manuscripts from collections in Britain and America The Rainborowes recreates day-to-day life on both sides of the Atlantic during one of the most tumultuous periods in Western history. In their efforts to build a paradise on earth, the Rainborowes and their friends encounter pirates and witches, prophets and princes, Muslem militants and Mohican Indians. They build new societies. They are ordinary men and women, and they do an extraordinary thing. 
 
They change the world.

The Rainborowes

Barack Obama

Bruce Springsteen

Two long-time friends share an intimate and urgent conversation about life, music and their enduring love of America, with all its challenges and contradictions, in this stunningly-produced expansion of their ground-breaking Higher Ground podcast, featuring more than 350 photographs, exclusive bonus content, and never-before-seen archival material. 
 
Renegades: Born in the USA is a candid, revealing, and entertaining dialogue between President Barack Obama and legendary musician Bruce Springsteen that explores everything from their origin stories and career-defining moments to the growing distance between the American Dream and the American reality. Filled with full-colour photographs and rare archival material, it is a compelling and beautifully illustrated portrait of two outsiders-one Black and one white-looking for a way to connect their unconventional searches for meaning, identity, and community with the American story itself. 
 
It includes: 
· Original introductions by President Obama and Bruce Springsteen 
· Exclusive new material from the Renegades podcast recording sessions 
· Obama's never-before-seen annotated speeches 
· Springsteen's handwritten lyrics for songs spanning his 50-year-long career 
· Rare and exclusive photographs from the authors' personal archives

Renegades

Born in the USA

Simon Winchester

A burgeoning new city is built on the dreams of the American gold rush. It is also built upon a landscape that has been stretching, sliding and breaking apart for millennia. In 1906 the dreams of this city came crashing down beneath the rippling wave of a horrifying earthquake that turned roads into great rippling rivers, that set buildings ablaze for days on end, that made homes collapse upon themselves.  Simon Winchester's breathtaking story delves deep beneath the surface of the earth and explains to us why the world moves as it does; and breaks apart with such devastating results. At the same time he never lets us forget the human story: what happened in this new, seemingly blessed city on the 18th April 1906. As he vividly portrays the lives of the people who suffered and survived the devastation he also tells a universal story: the hubris of man as he ignores the warnings of nature and how we respond and try to understand the world around us. Compelling, moving and enlightening, Simon Winchester brings to light the world beneath our feet and through the story of this one terrifying event one hundred years ago, begins to make sense of our world now.

A Crack in the Edge of the World

The Great American Earthquake of 1906

Rich Cohen

Whether you know him as El Amigo, the Banana Man, the Gringo, or simply Z - whether you even know him at all - Sam Zemurray lived one of the greatest untold American stories of the last hundred years. 
 
A tough, uneducated Russian Jew who found himself and his fortune in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Zemurray built a fruit-selling empire hustling rotting fruit to market to eke out the slimmest profit, to eventually become a backchannel kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary. The Fish That Ate the Whale spans the transition from Old-World business to New-: from privateer adventurers seeking fortunes in remote frontiers, to buccaneers of high finance and wars fought with media, no-bid contracts, and necessary illusions. 
 
Part of what makes this book so remarkable - and its dubious hero so compelling - is the almost invisible ease with which Cohen's threads intertwine to create a larger pattern that seems so obvious once you step back to see it. Z's story spans the birth of modern foreign relations, the creation of the CIA, smuggling dispossessed Jews out of Europe, the invention of Israel, corporate espionage, the Bay of Pigs, political assassination, and the unspoken motives of the Cold War. It is a twentieth-century epic, and standing at its core is a man unlike any we've seen before or since, who, for good or ill, looked at what was, but saw only what was possible.

The Fish that Ate the Whale

The Life and Times of America's Banana King

Simon Schama

Rough Crossings is the astonishing story of the struggle to freedom by thousands of African-American slaves who fled the plantations to fight behind British lines in the American War of Independence. With gripping, powerfully vivid story-telling, Simon Schama follows the escaped blacks into the fires of the war, and into freezing, inhospitable Nova Scotia where many who had served the Crown were betrayed in their promises to receive land at the war's end. Their fate became entwined with British abolitionists: inspirational figures such as Granville Sharp, the flute-playing father-figure of slave freedom, and John Clarkson, the 'Moses' of this great exodus, who accompanied the blacks on their final rough crossing to Africa, where they hoped that freedom would finally greet them.

Rough Crossings

Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution

John James Audubon

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, is still a standard work, and the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over. Born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea-captain, he was raised in France and sailed to America at the age of 18 where he went into business and began his study of birds. In 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with no other prospects, he set off on his epic quest to depict America's avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist's materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence while his devoted wife, Lucy, earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. Lionized as the 'American woodsman', he hit just the right Romantic note for the era, and was an overnight success, finding printers for his book first in Edinburgh, then London. It was a classic American tale of triumph over adversity. 
Here are vivid 'bird biographies', his correspondence with Lucy, journal accounts of his dramatic river journeys and hunting trips with the Osage Indians, and a generous sampling of brief stories that have long been out of print, 'The Burning of the Forests' and 'Kentucky Barbecue on the Fourth of July' among them. The Audubon Reader is an unforgettable encounter with early America: with its wildlife and birds, with its people and its primordial wilderness.

The Audubon Reader

Ron Chernow

Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influen­tial, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Mark Twain went west and accepted a job at the local newspaper, writing dis­patches that attracted attention for their brashness and humour. It wasn’t long until the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance.In this rich and nuanced portrait of Twain, Ron Chernow brings his powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a jour­nalist, satirist, and performer, and a family man, Twain went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the epicentre of American culture, emerging as the nation’s most notable political pundit and the only white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him and led him and his family to nine years of exile between London, France, Germany and Italy. During this time, he lost his wife and two daughters – the last stage of his life marked by heartache, politi­cal crusades, and eccentric behaviour that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, includ­ing thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow here captures the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in literary history, reminding us why Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated and quoted over a hundred years after his passing.

Mark Twain

Herbert Asbury, author of The Gangs of New York and The Gangs of Chicago, turns his attention to chronicle the seedy underworld of San Francisco, from its gold-rush glories to its subterranean opium dens. Houses of ill repute play host to shanghaied sailors, and the Chinese tong wars rage around the city. San Francisco's historic past is here brought to life in all its scintillating and infamous glory.

The Gangs Of San Francisco

Robert Dallek

In this epic and revelatory joint biography, one of America&rsquo;s most distinguished historians probes the lives and times of two unlikely leaders whose partnership dominated the world stage and changed the course of history. Tapping into a wealth of recently declassified documents and tapes, Robert Dallek uncovers fascinating details about Nixon and Kissinger&rsquo;s tumultuous personal relationship and the extent to which they struggled to outdo each other in the reach for foreign policy achievements. He also brilliantly analyzes their dealings with power brokers at home and abroad, while recognizing how both men were continually plotting to distract the American public&rsquo;s attention from the growing scandal of Watergate. Authoritative, illuminating and deeply engrossing, Nixon and Kissinger provides a startling new portrait and a new understanding of the immense power and sway these two men held in affecting world history.

Nixon and Kissinger

Partners in Power

Brian O’Donovan

From the start of his stint as RTÉ's Washington Correspondent Brian O'Donovan's lively and authoritative reporting of a tumultuous period in American life has been must-watch TV. 
 
Four Years in the Cauldron is his account of four busy years working in the US. He draws a compelling picture, full of telling colour and detail, of covering its fractured politics, particularly the extraordinary presidency of Donald Trump and the knife-edge election of Joe Biden. And he gives his unique perspective on big stories such as the Covid emergency, the Capitol riot, the murder of George Floyd and trial and conviction of his police killer. 
 
He also provides a visceral sense of what it's like living in a country shaped by guns, God, far-fetched conspiracy theories and the running sore of racism. Yet, drawing on his network of contacts, neighbours, friends and family connections outside the white-hot heat of Washington politics, he writes about the lives of ordinary American people with nuance and understanding. 
 
Four Years in the Cauldron is a must-read for getting to grips with the US at a moment of profound reckoning.

Four Years in the Cauldron

The Gripping Story of an Irishman Making Sense of America

Bernice L. McFadden

'Riveting... one of America’s most creative and necessary writers' SAPPHIRE 
'Absorbing' TLS 
 
A memoir about four generations of women whose lives illuminate a century of American history, by the author of Richard and Judy Book Club pick Sugar 
 
On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, we follow a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. 
 
In 80s Brooklyn, growing up in terror of her alcoholic father, young Bernice loses herself in books. But it’s not until she reads Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, stories about ‘messy, beautiful, joyful Black people’ so reminiscent of her loved ones, that she sees herself within their pages. 
 
Bernice’s family story begins in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870. Her descendants survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, joined the ‘great migration’, cried when Dr King was assassinated during The Civil Rights Movement. Wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down through generations of women like Lou’s handmade quilt. 
 
Tracing her roots gives Bernice the strength to write her own story. A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving account of a life shaped both by family history and a drive to be something more. 
 
'McFadden’s ability to tell a story makes this one of the most engrossing memoirs I have read in a long time… People will talk about these First Born Girls for years to come!' TARANA BURKE, activist and author of Unbound 
 
'Remarkable... Firstborn Girls is an absolute treasure' DEESHA PHILYAW, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Firstborn Girls

Four Generations, One Extraordinary Story

Ron Stallworth

· ADAPTED AS A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE BY SPIKE LEE 
· NOMINATED FOR SIX 2019 ACADEMY AWARDS &amp; WINNER OF 'BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY' BAFTA 
· WINNER OF THE GRAND PRIX AT CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2018 
· NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
What happens when a black detective goes undercover in the KKK? An extraordinary true story. 
 
In 1978, Ron Stallworth is the first black detective in the history of the Colorado Springs Police Department. In the local paper, he finds a classified ad for the Ku Klux Klan - and a P.O. box for interested enquiries. 
 
All he's expecting are some racist brochures and a few scraps of information about the white nationalist terrorists in his community. 
 
What he gets is a phone call inviting him to join the KKK. 
 
So he does. 
 
Launching an undercover investigation of incredible audacity, Ron recruits his partner Chuck to play the 'white' Ron Stallworth, while Stallworth himself talks to the Klan over the phone. During his months-long investigation, Stallworth sabotages cross burnings, exposes white supremacists in the military, and even manages to deceive the KKK "Grand Wizard" David Duke himself - dodging danger and reprisal at every turn... 
 
Black Klansman is an amazing true story and a rollercoaster of a crime thriller; a searing and timely portrait of a divided America and the extraordinary heroes who dare to fight back. 
___________________ 
 
'Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.' - Robert Kennedy 
___________________ 
‘Remarkable… Stallworth tells a surprising story’ – Daily Express

Black Klansman

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

Nicholas Pileggi

The Stardust… The Fremont… The Marina. 
They ran them all. 
And they lost. 
Big time. 
 
No one knew more about casinos than Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal, the gambling mastermind who, along with his best friend and partner, Anthony 'the Ant' Spilotro, virtually ran Las Vegas for the mob. For years it was the perfect arrangement – Lefty provided the smarts, while Tony kept the bosses happy with weekly suitcases filled with millions in skimmed cash. It should have lasted forever but Lefty’s obsessions with running the town – and Tony’s obsession with Lefty’s beautiful showgirl wife, Geri – eventually led to betrayals and investigations that exploded into one of the greatest scandals in mob history. 
 
Casino is the shattering inside account of how the mob finally lost its stranglehold on Las Vegas, the neon money-making machine it had created.

Casino

The Rise and Fall of the Mob in Las Vegas

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