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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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Edward Abel Smith

‘This was a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned... But no act was ever more necessary for the life of Britain and for all that depended upon it.’ 
WINSTON CHURCHILL- 
 
Summer, 1940. Winston Churchill watches in horror as France falls to the Germans in just six weeks, completing the Nazi conquest of mainland Europe. He faces an urgent question: what will happen to the mighty French Navy? Under Hitler's control it presents a major threat, and could make the German advance unstoppable. 
 
With the Nazis closing in, Churchill orders Operation Catapult. By the end of one of the most agonising but necessary military operations of the war, the British will have destroyed a large part of the French Navy and nearly 1,300 French sailors will be dead. 
 
Based on extensive new research and rediscovered eyewitness accounts, A Hateful Decision tells for the first time the full story of the British attack on the French fleet at Mers el Kébir, on 3 July 1940. 
 
As we pass between the men on the ground and the ratcheting tension in the European corridors of power, this riveting book brings to life Churchill’s darkest hour, and the act that demonstrated to the world how far Britain would go to win the war.

A Hateful Decision

Michael Calvin

Naftali Schiff

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
'A dramatic, poignant and astonishing untold story of the Holocaust.' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE 
 
‘Extraordinary. One of the most haunting episodes of the war.’ DAILY MAIL 
 
'The remarkable story of a unique event - the reprieve of 51 Hungarian Jewish teenagers already naked and trapped inside the gas chambers.' PROFESSOR ROBERT JAN VAN PELT 
 
An unforgettable testament to hope and the bonds of brotherhood, Miracle reveals the untold story of the boys who escaped the gas chamber in Auschwitz, the only known group of Holocaust survivors to walk away from the jaws of the Nazi killing machine. 
 
Early on the morning of October 10, 1944, eight-hundred boys, aged between 13 and 17, were taken out of Block 11 at Auschwitz. The night before, during a visit by Dr Josef Mengele, their identification cards had been stamped with a solitary German word – gestorben – 'died' in English. They were then marched by 25 bayonet-wielding SS men to Crematorium 5, stripped, and herded into a gas chamber. 
 
This book is the story of a true-life miracle of the fifty-one boys who were pulled from that gas chamber – the only Holocaust survivors known to have escaped such a close brush with the Nazi killing machine – and given a second chance at life. A life, of course, that would be so horrifically snatched from those around them. 
 
Based on the first-hand testimonies of six of the boys, six survivors whose stories are shared in this book for the very first time, Miracle interweaves the lives of the boys and the grander sweep of history in which they were held. The result is an unforgettable tale of hope, faith and fortitude in the face of one of the worst crimes against humanity. 
 
‘Astonishing. A powerful book.’ JEWISH NEWS 
 
'A truly extraordinary story.' JAMES O'BRIEN 
 
‘The remarkable but harrowing true story. Extraordinary.’ TIMES RADIO

Miracle

The Boys Who Escaped the Gas Chamber in Auschwitz

Robert Moore

____________________ 
 
NOW OUT IN CINEMAS, STARRING COLIN FIRTH, MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS AND LEA SÉYDOUX 
 
'It takes you through each nail-biting moment . . . heart-breaking, humane and, at times, all too vivid. I've rarely read such a gripping work of non-fiction' COLIN FIRTH 
____________________ 
 
At 11.30 a.m. on Saturday 12 August 2000, two massive explosions roared through the shallow Arctic waters of the Barents Sea. The Kursk, pride of the Northern Fleet and the largest attack submarine in the world, was hurtling towards the ocean floor. 
 
In Kursk (originally published as A Time to Die), award-winning journalist Robert Moore vividly recreates this disaster minute by minute. Venturing into a covert world where the Cold War continues out of sight, Moore investigates the military and political background to the tragedy. But above all, he tells the nail-bitingly poignant human story of the families waiting ashore, of the desperate efforts of British, Norwegian and Russian rescuers, and of the Kursk sailors, trapped in the aft compartnemt, waiting for rescue, as a horrified world followed their battle to stay alive . . .

Kursk

Film tie-in

A Time To Die

Allan Mallinson

‘War is too important to be left to the generals’ snapped future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau on learning of yet another bloody and futile offensive on the Western Front. 
One of the great questions in the ongoing discussions and debate about the First World War is why did winning take so long and exact so appalling a human cost? After all this was a fight that, we were told, would be over by Christmas. 
Now, in his major new history, Allan Mallinson, former professional soldier and author of the acclaimed 1914: Fight the Good Fight, provides answers that are disturbing as well as controversial, and have a contemporary resonance. He disputes the growing consensus among historians that British generals were not to blame for the losses and setbacks in the ‘war to end all wars’ – that, given the magnitude of their task, they did as well anyone could have. He takes issue with the popular view that the ‘amateur’ opinions on strategy of politicians such as Lloyd George and, especially, Winston Churchill, prolonged the war and increased the death toll. On the contrary, he argues, even before the war began Churchill had a far more realistic, intelligent and humane grasp of strategy than any of the admirals or generals, while very few senior officers – including Sir Douglas Haig – were up to the intellectual challenge of waging war on this scale. And he repudiates the received notion that Churchill’s stature as a wartime prime minister after 1940 owes much to the lessons he learned from his First World War ‘mistakes’ – notably the Dardanelles campaign – maintaining that in fact Churchill’s achievement in the Second World War owes much to the thwarting of his better strategic judgement by the ‘professionals’ in the First – and his determination that this would not be repeated. 
 
Mallinson argues that from day one of the war Britain was wrong-footed by absurdly faulty French military doctrine and paid, as a result, an unnecessarily high price in casualties. He shows that Lloyd George understood only too well the catastrophically dysfunctional condition of military policy-making and struggled against the weight of military opposition to fix it. And he asserts that both the British and the French failed to appreciate what the Americans’ contribution to victory could be – and, after the war, to acknowledge fully what it had actually been.

Too Important for the Generals

Losing and Winning the First World War

Huntly Gordon

In the centenary year of the Great War, names such as Ypres, the Marne, the Somme, Passchendaele are heavy with meaning as settings for the near-destruction of a generation of men. It is this aura of tragedy that makes Huntly Gordon’s memoir, drawn from his letters written from the Front, such a potent one. 
He was sensitive, intelligent, unpretentious and, as his account reveals, capable of detached and trenchant judgement. As the summer of 1914 drew to a close, it was difficult for a16 year-old schoolboy to realize that the world for which he had been prepared at Clifton College was itself preparing for war. By 1916, he was commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery. By June 1917, he was at the Ypres Salient getting his ‘baptism’ at Hell Fire Corner in an intensive artillery duel that formed the prologue to Passchendaele itself. Early in 1918, his battery would fight a series of rearguard actions near Baupaume that would help turn the tide of the massive German Spring offensive. 
Huntly Gordon has given us an enduring and classic memoir: a poignant and extraordinarily human account of history as it happened.

The Unreturning Army

‘No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening’, wrote Churchill. ‘The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed…in fact the War was decided in the first twenty days of fighting, and all that happened afterwards consisted in battles which, however formidable and devastating, were but desperate and vain appeals against the decision of fate.’ 
 
On of Britain's foremost military historians and defence experts tackles the origins - and the opening first few weeks of fighting - of what would become known as 'the war to end all wars'. Intensely researched and convincingly argued, Allan Mallinson explores and explains the grand strategic shift that occurred in the century before the war, the British Army’s regeneration after its drubbings in its fight against the Boer in South Africa, its almost calamitous experience of the first twenty days’ fighting in Flanders to the point at which the British Expeditionary Force - the 'Old Contemptibles' - took up the spade in the middle of September 1914: for it was then that the war changed from one of rapid and brutal movement into the more familiar vision of trench warfare on Western Front. In this vivid, compelling new history, Malliinson brings his experience as a professional soldier to bear on the circumstances, events, actions and individuals and speculates – tantalizingly – on what might have been...

1914: Fight the Good Fight

Britain, the Army and the Coming of the First World War

Guy Walters

In early 1942 the Germans opened a top-security prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Poland for captured Allied airmen. Called Stalag Luft III, the camp soon came to contain some of the most inventive escapers ever known. They were led by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, code-named 'Big X', who masterminded an attempt to smuggle hundreds of POWs down a tunnel built right under the noses of their guards. 
 
The escape would come to be immortalised in the famous film The Great Escape, in which the ingenuity and bravery of the men was rightly celebrated. The plan involved multiple tunnels, hundreds of forged documents, as well as specially made German uniforms and civilian clothing. In this book Guy Walters takes a fresh look at this remarkable event and asks the question, what was the true story, not the movie version? He also examines what the escape really achieved, and the nature of the man who led it. 
 
The Real Great Escape is the first account to draw on a newly-released cache of documents from Roger Bushell’s family, including letters from Bushell, that reveals much about this remarkable man, his life and experiences during the war, and the planning of the escape attempt that was to make him famous. The result is a compelling and authoritative re-evaluation of the most iconic escape story of the Second World War.

The Real Great Escape

H Norman Schwarzkopf

In this remarkable autobiography, Norman Schwarzkopf recounts his boyhood years in New Jersey, during the Second World War, and his unique adolescence spent in the Middle East and Europe that would later prove invaluable. Here, too, is a frank account of his life at West Point and his early disillusionment with the 'real' Army that nearly prompted him to leave the military. 
 
General Schwarzkopf speaks openly about his tours of duty in Vietnam, his assignments in Washington and his sometimes uneasy relationship with the Pentagon. He provides inspiring thoughts on leadership and reveals the events behind Desert Shield/Desert Storm, including candid portraits of Colin Powell, Richard Cheney and President George Bush. We experience first hand the complexities of coordinating the campaign, of maintaining strategic secrecy during the world's first internationally televised war, and of the sunsitive negotiations with Israel and Saudi Arabia. 
 
It Doesn't Take A Hero is an intensely personal portrait of an American life forged from strongly held ideals tested in the cauldron of war - the triumphant journey of a soldier who set his star by a simple but timeless motto: duty, honour and country.

It Doesn't Take A Hero

Edgehill, 1642: Surveying the disastrous scene in the aftermath of the first battle of the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell realizes that war can no longer be made in the old, feudal way: there has to be system and discipline, and therefore - eventually - a standing professional army. 
 
From the 'New Model Army' of Cromwell's distant vision, former soldier Allan Mallinson shows us the people and events that have shaped the army we know today. How Marlborough's momentous victory at Blenheim is linked to Wellington's at Waterloo; how the desperate fight at Rorke's Drift in 1879 underpinned the heroism of the airborne forces at Arnhem in 1944; and why Montgomery's momentous victory at El Alamein mattered long after the Second World War was over. 
 
From the Army's origins at the battle of Edgehill to our current conflict in Afghanistan, this is history at its most relevant - and most dramatic.

The Making Of The British Army

Ian Denys Peek

In February 1942, Singapore fell to the Japanese. Denys Peek and his brother were just two of tens of thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers and citizens taken prisoner. 
Eight months later, he and his comrades were packed into steel goods wagons and transported by rail to Siam. They were to become part of the slave labour force destined for the massive construction project that would later become infamous as the Burma Thailand Railway. He would spend the next three years in over fifteen different work and 'hospital' camps on the railway, stubbornly refusing to give in and die in a place where over 20,000 prisoners of war and uncounted slave labourers met their deaths. 
Narrated in the present tense and written with clarity, passion and a remarkable eye for detail, Denys Peek has vividly recreated not just the hardships and horrors of the railway and the daily struggle for survival but also the comradeship, spirit and humour of the men who worked on it. It stands as a haunting, evocative and deeply moving testimony to the suffering of those who lived and died there - a salutary reminder of man's potential for inhumanity to his fellow man.

One Fourteenth Of An Elephant

Will Davies

'Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one - fire! Down goes the firing switch. At first, nothing. Then from deep down there comes a low rumble, and it as if the world is spliting apart...' 
 
On 7th June 1917, nineteen massive mines exploded beneath Messines Ridge near Ypres. The largest man-made explosion in history up until that point shattered the landscape and smashed open the German lines. Ten thousand German soldiers died. 
Two of the mines - at Hill 60 and the Caterpillar - were fired by men of the 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, comprising miners and engineers rather than parade-ground soldiers. Drawing on the diaries of one of the key combatants, Benealth Hill 60 tells the little-known, devastatingly brutal true story of this subterranean war waged beneath the Western Front - a stygian battle-ground where men drowned in viscous chalk, suffocated in the blue gray clay, choked on poisonous air or died in the darkness, caught up up in vicious hand-to-hand fighting...

Beneath Hill 60

Howard Reid

On 6 April 1943, Ian Reid, an officer in the Black Watch, was wounded and captured in Tunisia and sent off to an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. Five months later, when the Germans took over the camp as the Italians pulled out of the war, he escaped. So began a life-or-death game of hide and seek in the heart of the beautiful Italian countryside, living in barns, sleeping in ditches and desperate scavenging for food. He was recaptured - though heroically he was to escape from the Germans a total of five times. 
 
Nearly sixty years later, Howard Reid quite literally followed in his father's footsteps and made the same journey across Italy - though in a rather more relaxed fashion. Starting near Modena, he travelled to Florence and through Chianti, Siena and Orvieto to Rome and beyond, painting an intimate portrait of his extraordinary father and getting closer to the truth of his amazing escapades, which were the subject of a bestselling book in the 1950s. 
 
Along the way, as we are shown the real, modern Italy, Howard mused on father-son relationships, and the deep but invisible scars left by two world wars on each of our personal histories. This poignant and engrossing book is a must for everyone who has ever asked (or wanted, too late, to ask) the question 'What did you do in the war, Dad?'

Dad's War

Christopher Hale

In 1938, on the eve of war, a Nazi expedition set out through British India on a mission sponsored by Himmler himself. Its aim was to trace the origins of the Aryan race, high in the sacred mountains of Tibet. The expedition was led by two complex individuals - Ernst Schäfer, a swashbuckling, gun-toting naturalist for whom Nazism promised a short-cut to personal glory, and Bruno Beger, an anthropologist whose racial theories were taken to their logical conclusion in Auschwitz. 
Schäfer and Beger soon found themselves battling hostility from the British, being manipulated by the Tibetans and struggling with the primitive conditions in the holy city of Lhasa. Every detail of the expedition was recorded in diaries, letters and secret reports. It was also documented in thousands of extraordinary photographs (some of which are reproduced here for the first time in decades) and on film. 
Despite this abundant documentation, the full story of Schäfer's ill-fated expedition has never been told. This encounter between the British and the Nazis so close to the Second World War forms a 'picture in little' of the conflict to come. HIMMLER'S CRUSADE explores the ideological roots of the Nazis' obsession with racial theory and the occult. Using the wealth of primary material as well as his own interviews with Bruno Beger, Christopher Hale has written a fascinating and thought-provoking book that brilliantly evokes this little-known prelude to the unimaginable horror of war.

Himmler's Crusade

E P F Lynch

'It's the end of the 1916 winter and the conditions are almost unbelievable. We live in a world of Somme mud. We sleep in it, work in it, fight in it, wade in it and many of us die in it. We see it, feel it, eat it and curse it, but we can't escape it, not even by dying...' 
Edward Lynch enlisted when he was just 18 - one of thousands of fresh-faced men who were proudly waved off by the crowds as they embarked for France. It was 1916 and the majority had no idea of the reality of the Somme trenches, of the traumatised soldiers they would encounter there, of the innumerable, awful contradictions of war. Private Lynch was one of those who survived, and on his return home, wrote Somme Mud in pencil in over 20 school exercise books, perhaps in the hope of coming to terms with all that he had witnessed there? 
Written from the perspective of an ordinary 'Tommy' and told with dignity, candour and surprising wit, Somme Mud is a testament to the human spirit: for out of the mud that threatened to suck out a man's soul rises a compelling story of humanity and friendship. 
For all who are marking the centenary of the Great War, it is a rare and precious find.

Somme Mud

Jay Kopelman

Melinda Roth

When Marines enter an abandoned house in Fallujah, Iraq, and hear a suspicious noise, they clench their weapons, edge around a corner, and prepare to open fire. 
 
What they find during the US-led attack on the 'most dangerous city on Earth', however, is not an insurgent bent on revenge, but a tiny puppy left behind when most of the city's population fled before the bombing. Despite military law that forbids the keeping of pets, the Marines de-flea the pup with kerosene, de-worm him with chewing tobacco, and fill him up on Meals Ready to Eat. Thus begins the dramatic rescue attempt of a dog named Lava and Lava's rescue of at least one Marine, Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman, from the emotional ravages of war. 
 
From hardened Marines to wartime journalists to endangered Iraqi citizens, From Baghdad, With Love tells an unforgettable story of an unlikely band of heroes who learn unexpected lessons about life, death, and war from a mangy flea-ridden refugee.

From Baghdad, With Love

William Ash

Determined to take on the Nazis, Texan Bill Ash joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1939 and in so doing sacrificed his citizenship. Before long, he was sent to England wherehe flew Spitfires. Shot down over France in March 1942, he survived the crash-landing and, thanks to local civilians, evaded capture for months only to be betrayed to the Gestapo in Paris. Tortured and sentenced to death as a spy, he was saved from the firing squad by the Luftwaffe who sent him to the infamous 'Great Escape' POW camp, Stalag Luft III. It was from there that Bill began his 'tour' of Occupied Europe. Breaking out of a succession of camps, he became one of only a handful of serial escape artists to attempt more than a dozen break-outs - over the wire, under it in tunnels, through it with cutters or simply strolling out of the camp gates in disguise! They were years of extraordinary hardship, frustration and brutality - the penalty for escaping was a long spell in solitary - but throughout it all Bill Ash displayed not just remarkable courage but also an anarchic sense of humour, great humanity and an unstoppable desire for freedom. 
Honest, funny and exciting, Under the Wire is both a riveting war memoir and a tribute to the bravery and resolve of an entire generation.

Under The Wire

Earl Swift

The US government has an unspoken pledge with every man and woman it sends into battle: you may be wounded doing your duty, you may even be killed, but you won't be left behind... 
 
On 20 March 1971, during the largest helicopter battle in history, an American chopper on a daring rescue mission exploded in the skies over Laos. Its scorched remains fell onto terrain about which allied forces knew little except that it was hostile - jungle so dense with North Vietnamese that going after the dead crewmen was out of the question. And so two highly decorated pilots and a pair of gunners who had each earned the Silver Star for heroism earlier that day were left where they lay: four among the 2,583 US servicemen whose bodies remained unrecovered at war's end. 
30 years later and a team of soldiers and scientists ventures back into that battlefield to dig among the unexploded bombs and landmines, in ground slick from monsoon rains, in jungle infested with leeches, giant centipedes and poisonous snakes, to find those four crew and to bring them home. Its mission is one of dozens conducted every year, in Asia, Europe and the scattered islands of the Pacific - to locate and bury America's war dead and to put a name - the right name - on each headstone. 
WHERE THEY LAY tells the story of this recovery team and its elusive employer: the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory - the world's largest forensic science lab. Part history, part travelogue, part scientific adventure, it chronicles the years-long effort to find the remains of those heroes, culminating in an expedition into a land that even today is virtually invisible to the world at large. It has all the makings of a classic of modern warfare - and its aftermath.

Where They Lay

L A Carlyon

'Because it was fought so close to his old home ground, Homer might have seen this war on the Gallipoli Peninsula as an epic. Brief by his standards, but essentially heroic. Shakespeare might have seen it as a tragedy with splendid bit-parts for buffoons and brigands and lots of graveyard scenes. Those thigh bones you occasionally see rearing out of the yellow earth of Gully ravine, snapped open so that they look like pumice, belong to a generation of young men who on this peninsula first lost their innocence and then their lives, and maybe something else as well...' 
 
Gallipoli remains one of the most poignant battlefronts of the First World War and L. A. Carlyon's monumental account of that campaign has been rightfully acclaimed and a massive bestseller in Australia. Brilliantly told, supremely readable and deeply moving, Gallipoli brings this epic tragedy to life and stands as both a landmark chapter in the history of the war and a salutary reminder of all that is fine and all that is foolish in the human condition.

Gallipoli

Jim Smith

Malcolm McConnell

14 August 1945. As Emperor Hirohito recorded a message of surrender for the Japanese people, rebel troops commanded by high-ranking officers from War Minister Anami¹s staff burst into the Imperial palace. Their intention was to stage a coup, destroy the recording and issue forged orders for Japan to continue the war. Had they succeeded, there would have been massive kamikaze attacks on allied forces, causing carnage and possibly provoking America to drop a third atomic bomb on an already devastated Japan... 
 
But on that fateful night, in the skies approaching Tokyo, a stream of B-29B 'Superfortress' bombers were heading towards Japan's last functioning oil refinery. Fearing that the approaching planes could be carrying another atom bomb, Japanese air defences ordered a total black out of the city and the Imperial palace and in so doing completely disrupted the rebels' plans, enabling soldiers loyal to the Emperor to sieze back control. At midday on 15 August 1945, the Imperial message of surrender was broadcast throughout Japan. The Second World War was finally over. 
 
THE LAST MISSION is gripping work of speculative investigation into one of the least known yet profoundly significant episodes of World War II.

The Last Mission

Doug Stanton

On 30 July 1945 the USS Indianapolis was steaming through the South Pacific, on her way home having delivered the bomb that was to decimate Hiroshima seven days later, when she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Of a crew of 1196 men an estimated 300 were killed upon impact; the remaining 900 sailors went into the sea. Undetected for five days, they struggled to stay alive, fighting off sharks, hypothermia and madness. By the time rescue arrived, only 317 men were left alive. 
 
Interweaving the stories of some of these survivors (including the ship's Captain Butler McVay, who would be unjustly court-martialled for the loss of his ship and, twenty years later and tormented by the experience, take his own life), Doug Stanton brings this incredible human drama to life in a narrative that is at once immediate and timeless. The definitive account of a near-forgotten chapter in the history of the last war, In Harm's Way has become a classic. 
 
And, some 72 years later, in August 2017, the USS Indianapolis was once again making international headlines - with the news that a marine archaeology team had located the ship's shattered remains: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/world/asia/uss-indianapolis-paul-allen.html?mcubz=1

In Harm's Way

Aaron Young

Peleliu

Terry Deary

War: what is it good for? Absolutely something, or presumably we wouldn't keep doing it. 
 
In A History of the World in Ten Wars, we will learn why the Greeks decided to band together with their rival cities; where counterintelligence was first invented 2,000 years ago; how the birth of chivalry helped to set the rules of war (as long as you were a Christian); and the innovative guerrilla tactics of the Mongols, who were surprisingly interested in supply chains. We'll also discover why diseases killed more than bullets in the Crimean War and why the so-called World Wars were really one very long war with a break for half-time. 
 
Throughout the ages, each generation has faced the same questions. Am I willing to fight for my way of life? How can I come up with something the enemy hasn’t thought of? And the important one that people often forget to ask: is there a way of solving this amicably?

A History of The World in Ten Wars

Estate of Harry Birrell

From the moment he received a cine-camera at age 10, Harry Birrell devoted his life to documenting the world around him, including his enlistment and his adventures serving in the Burma, Nepal and India. Not only did he capture the war as he saw it, but he kept copious diaries from 1939 to 1945 so that his family would know what he had experienced in the event of his death. These unique record of the campaign are compelling, insightful, funny, charming, moving - all in equal measure. 
 
As a soldier posted with the Gurkhas for most of the war, Harry Birrell worked as a surveyor, mapping out the country as the war with the Japanese ebbed and flowed around him. While this might seem like it was away from any action, the job of creating these references for the fighting part of the army was critical and required him to be at the front line in order that the troops and their commanders had the most up to date and accurate maps as the war evolved. As a result, he has an unusual insider overview of that brutal campaign as well as wonderful insight into the Gurkhas under his command.

To War with the Gurkhas: War Diaries

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

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