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Paul Chandler

Rachel Chandler

Sarah Edworthy

On 23 October 2009, British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler were kidnapped from their sailing boat in the archipelago of the Seychelles. 
 
Their yacht, Lynn Rival, was recovered six days later by naval forces, abandoned off the central Somali coast. 
 
After the attack, Paul and Rachel were taken first onto a previously hijacked merchant ship and then to Somalia, where they were held for over a year, enduring threats and intimidation while their captors tried to extort millions of dollars from their family. 
 
In this remarkable book, the Chandlers recount their terrifying ordeal, revealing the inspiring and poignant story behind the dramatic headlines. At the heart of their survival was their unshakeable belief in each other and their determination to survive, making Hostage an unlikely love story; for Paul and Rachel, death, at times, seemed preferable to being separated.

Hostage

A Year at Gunpoint with Somali Gangsters

Rosalinda V. Hutton

After an idyllic early childhood in Surrey, Linda's life descended into poverty and chaos when her parents' marriage crumbled and her unstable mother's sanity declined. 
 
She experienced a brief period of comfort in a caring foster home before being plunged into the dark, terrifying world of a 1960s institution. St Anne's Convent, Orpington, was a Catholic children's home run by the infamous Sisters of Mercy and a former monk who inflicted bizarre and barbaric beliefs and practices on the children in his care. 
 
Cry and You Cry Alone is the achingly honest story of a survivor of shocking child abuse that took place in the heart of an English suburb.

Cry and You Cry Alone

The Girl Who Vowed She'd Never Forget

Josephine Duthie

Say Nothing is the moving true story of four neglected siblings who were taken into care following the breakdown of their parents' marriage. Sent to a small croft in the north-east of Scotland, they endured an onslaught of physical and mental abuse at the hands of an elderly, inexperienced foster mother. 
 
 For ten years the children's cries for help were ignored and misunderstood in the naive social-work climate of the late 1950s, and this heartbreaking personal account of cruelty and neglect reveals the effect this maltreatment had on their ability to adjust to a normal adult life. 
 
 Say Nothing was written as a voice of support for all abused children who are afraid or were never given the chance to tell their story.

Say Nothing

The Harrowing Truth About Auntie's Children

Paul Mason

Paul Mason’s father was a policeman. He was also a member of a sadistic paedophile ring. He would keep Paul locked up and naked in a tiny cupboard under the stairs of their home before sexually abusing him. This cycle of abuse continued for several years and also affected his brother. The cupboard became a horrific prison where fear and terror filled his every moment. 
 
The Cupboard Under the Stairs is a story of abuse at the mercy of adults whom Paul should have been able to trust. There followed a life almost destroyed by their actions. It is the harrowing story of one man’s fight for justice and an end to the horrific memories that still haunt him daily.

The Cupboard Under the Stairs

A Boy Trapped in Hell...

Christopher Chance

This is a true story of survival in what was arguably the most sinister prison in Europe: the Carabanchel. Christopher Chance was the last Brit to be shackled and hauled out of that infamous Spanish hellhole before it closed its gates on decades of disgraceful cruelty. Along with the rest of the remaining inmates, he was transferred to another prison when the authorities slid back the bolts for the last time. 
 
Chance's story begins on the day he entered the jail and encountered the innate racism of the prison staff and inmates. Intimidation and constant bullying by Spanish gypsies, gangsters and heroin dealers forced 'Chancer' to become ultra-violent in his quest to live unmolested during his stay, while psychotic prison officers peddled booze and drugs, and performed barbaric acts on inmates. 
 
In Carabanchel, Chance tells how he forged a band of international brothers from the chaotic human rubble in order to survive. Men from all around the world joined forces against their common aggressors, the Spanish inmates. Chancer's gang became invincible in this cauldron of hate and fear; their numbers were few but their strength lay in the loyalty and respect they had for each other, combined with their courage and fighting skills. Chance highlights the fact that much international crime is planned in prison and strong business friendships are forged which last for years. 
 
This harrowing tale is prison writing in the raw. The action remains unremittingly confined to the brutal, ugly and corrupt environment of the Carabanchel and rubs the noses of the politically correct brigade in the filth of the real world.

Carabanchel

The Last Brit in Europe's Hellhole Prison

Neville Thompson

Every day the population of Ireland wakes up to reports of another horror case of crime. The streets have become unsafe to walk upon and yet nothing seems to be done about it. Politicians make noises voicing their disgust while the police make arrests only to have the perpetrators walk free. Despite all the media hype, no one seems to be any nearer to solving the problem.Streetwise reveals what is really happening on the streets. The stories contained here are told by prisoners: those who have been involved in crime and are now paying their debt to society, allowing the reader to enter the minds of criminals and begin to understand the circumstances behind their actions. Meet Chang, who started joyriding at eight years old and was infamous among police and legendary among fellow law-breakers by the age of 12; Mucka, a once saintly schoolboy who was abandoned by both his family and society so took to robbing as a form of revenge; PJ, man of the house and breadwinner at 11, alcoholic by 12; and Tommy, the divorc who was refused social welfare so robbed the Co-op of a million Euros and soon found the local wing of the IRA knocking at his door. An exhilarating, emotional roller coaster, Street Wise contains frank accounts from those who have succumbed to crime through boredom, poverty or desperation. It shows how men from different backgrounds have fallen into similar crime traps and what has finally placed them on the path to redemption.

Streetwise

Stories From An Irish Prison

David Leslie

Convicted murderer Billy Ferris has endured more than three decades behind bars in many of Britain's prisons. In The Hate Factory, he candidly documents his experiences in jail with some of the UK's most notorious criminals. 
 
 Jailed for life in 1977 for a crime of passion, Ferris experienced betrayal and treachery on the inside. He unexpectedly formed friendships that led to his being labelled a 'bombers' crony' and found love while on the run after a dramatic escape. He vividly describes the cruelty, savagery and degradation that go hand in hand with prison life and details the nightmare that was Wormwood Scrubs, the prison he christened 'the Hate Factory'. He relays what happened when his cell was used as a courtroom for an IRA punishment trial and how he hatched a plan to assassinate the son of a legendary underworld godfather and plotted to murder an informer. 
 
 Over the 30 years during which Ferris has been imprisoned, his fellow inmates have included some of the UK's 'most wanted' from London underworld enforcer 'Mad' Frankie Fraser to Archie Hall, the serial killer dubbed 'the Monster Butler'.

The Hate Factory

Thirty Years Inside with the UK's Most Notorious Villains

Martha Long

After a failed suicide attempt and recovery in the mad house, Martha is heading for France to be reunited with the one true love of her life. 
 
Father Ralph Fitzgerald rescued her from the streets when she was sixteen and was the first person to show Martha true love and affection. But their relationship threatened his vocation and he eventually fled to Africa to take up missionary work. 
 
Martha never got over losing him and now, after nearly twenty years, he has made contact again. She sets off on a mission to find him and uncover his motives for getting in touch. Does he still love her? Has he left the priesthood? Is he now free to marry her? She needs to know what the future is going to hold.

Ma, I've Reached for the Moon an I'm Hittin the Stars

On hearing that Jackser, her childhood abuser, is seriously ill, Martha is elated, thinking that finally she will be able to watch him suffer. But in the hospital she sees a frightened, lonely old man and realises with a shock that he seems to regret his earlier actions. 
 
During her vigil, she is joined by Charlie, her beloved little brother, then the ma and some of her other siblings. All of them have suffered greatly and it is clear that no one connected to Jackser has escaped unscathed. 
 
But as she sits with him during his dying days, other memories of Jackser come back to Martha – fleeting moments of concern and kindness, and a sense of closeness as he recalled his own tormented past in one of Ireland’s industrial schools. It is a vicious cycle of cruelty and loss that has played out, from which only her own tenacity and wit has provided an escape. 
 
Poignant, ribald, poetic and defiant, with its resolution of many unanswered questions about her life this is Martha at her best.

Ma, Jackser's Dyin Alone

Philip Carlo

Written by the bestselling author of The Ice Man, The Butcher is a gripping and disturbing fly-on-the-wall account of the US Drug Enforcement Administration's four-year hunt to bring down Tommy 'Karate' Pitera, a drug-dealing, murderous capo in the Bonanno crime family. 
 
In 1992, Pitera was sentenced to life in prison for murdering six people and supporting a massive drug-dealing operation. Yet this covered only a fraction of the crimes he committed. Pitera is thought to have murdered more than 60 people, cutting many of his victims into pieces before burying them on Staten Island. 
 
Exhaustively researched and written with the cooperation of the DEA agents who hunted Pitera down, The Butcher will send shivers down the spine of the most hardened reader.

The Butcher

Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath

Bernard O'Mahoney

Trouble in Mind is bernard o'mahoney's unblinkingly honest account of his eventful life so far. 
 
 Growing up in Dunstable, Bedfordshire, O'Mahoney regularly bore the brunt of his father's psychotic violence. After a spell in the army, he served two prison sentences for wounding, before moving to Basildon and forming the Essex Boys firm, one of the most successful and violent criminal gangs in British history. 
 
 When O'Mahoney quit the firm, he received death threats from his partners, who were murdered less than a fortnight later. He was arrested in the aftermath of the triple murder but was never charged. 
 
 As he began to distance himself from his shady past, tragedy struck when his young wife died suddenly and, grieving, he spiralled out of control and ended up serving another spell in prison. 
 
 The Essex Boys firm has been the subject of three films and numerous books, but the gang's infamous activities are only one remarkable aspect of O'Mahoney's extraordinary life story, which he candidly recounts in this gripping memoir.

Trouble in Mind

An Autobiography

Martin Dillon

In The Trigger Men, bestselling author Martin Dillon delves into the dark and sinister world of Irish terrorism and counter-terrorism. Over three decades he has interviewed and investigated some of the most professional, dangerous and ruthless killers in Ireland. Now Dillon explores their personalities, motivations and bizarre crimes.Many of Ireland's assassins learned their trade in fields and on hillsides in remote parts of Ireland, while others were trained in the Middle East or with Basque separatist terrorists in Spain. Some were one-target-one-shot killers, like the sniper who terrorised the inhabitants of Washington State in the autumn of 2002, while others were bombers skilled in designing the most sophisticated explosive devices and booby traps. Another more powerful group of 'trigger men' were the influential figures in the shadows, who were experts in motivating the killers under their control. All of these men, whether they squeezed the trigger on a high-powered rifle, set the timer on a bomb or used their authority to send others out to commit horrific and unspeakable acts of cruelty, are featured in this book. The Trigger Men takes the reader inside the labyrinthine world of terrorist cells and highly classified counter-terrorism units of British Military Intelligence. The individual stories are described in gripping, unflinching detail and show how the terrorists carried out their ghastly work. Dillon also explores the ideology of the cult of the gunmen and the greed and hatred that motivated assassins in their killing sprees. There are penetrating insights into the mindset of the most infamous assassins: their social and historical conditioning, their callousness......

The Trigger Men

Assassins and Terror Bosses in the Ireland Conflict

In this latest instalment of Martha Long's real-life account of abuse, deprivation and cruelty at the hands of her mother's partner and the establishment, Martha is now 16 and her time at the convent school is up. In Ma, It's a Cold Aul Night an I'm Lookin for a Bed, she leads us through her first months of freedom. 
 
 With no home to go to, Martha leaves the convent carrying her suitcase and a burning ambition to shake off her impoverished past. Hungry to become a person who will blend in with the middle classes, Martha yearns to be accepted as someone who can be loved, respected, and one day have a home of her own where she will be safe. But this is 1960s Dublin, where poverty is rife and the Church works together with the Irish government to keep the poor and the ignorant in their place. 
 
 Martha first finds work as a home help with a loving, lively family, which leads her to a job in a shop, an Italian fish and chip café, then as a skivvy in a miserable household where she is reminded of the terror Jackser brought into her life. Chance meetings with brothers and old friends from the convent lift Martha's spirits, but soon she is back on the streets searching for work and a warm bed to call her own. 
 
 Martha is not often deterred when fate deals her a blow. 'Life is a bowl of cherries!' she reasons. But heartache awaits as people turn her away and predators lurk in the shadows.

Ma, It's a Cold Aul Night an I'm Lookin for a Bed

Clare Gee

Addicted to coke and booze and reliant on selling her body for cash, Katie, the heroine of Clare Gee's bestselling Hooked, can no longer cope with the life she's created for herself. She has messed up badly and thrown everything away. 
 
 Mentally, she is an anxious wreck and physically she is in pieces. Yet she is terrified of who she will become without her vices. She has to do something, though, and her choices are get help or die. She leaves London and admits herself to a residential rehab centre for three months. 
 
 In Unhooked, reformed addict Clare Gee draws on her own experiences of cocaine addiction, alcoholism and prostitution in telling a moving story of a young woman battling through hell to create a sober life for herself. There are threats of expulsion from rehab and relapses, but through dedication and honesty, Katie begins the long journey to becoming clean and finding peace of mind.

Unhooked

The Rehab of a London Call Girl

Allan Grice

Working as a fireman in London’s East End during the early 1970s was no easy ride. In the years before workplace health-and-safety legislation had started to exert its grip, Allan Grice had to cut his fire-and-rescue teeth without the advantages of a breathing apparatus for each member of his crew. Back then, the time-tested strategy was to ‘get in’ – to crawl below the intense heat and ‘eat’ the thick smoke – in order to locate a missing child or to halt a rapidly spreading inferno. 
 
 In Call the Fire Brigade!, Grice recounts his most memorable experiences as a front-line member of the London Fire Brigade working the city’s East End, with its myriad commercial premises, brooding Thames-side warehouses, seedy tenements and colourful cosmopolitan community, ranging from prosperous manufacturers to down-and-out winos with their body-warming bonfires in derelict houses. 
 
 Fires in factories, tenements and warehouses, and non-fire emergencies such as the Moorgate Tube disaster of 1975, are graphically described, while the elation of rescue, the sadness of being too late to save lives and the warm camaraderie of fire crews during some of the capital’s busiest peacetime years are vividly depicted.

Call the Fire Brigade!

Fighting London's Fires in the '70s

ESSEX BOYS is the brand new edition of the shocking bestseller known as SO THIS IS ECSTASY?. It is the true story of the rise of one of the most violent and successful criminal gangs of the 90's whose reign of terror was finally terminated when the three leaders were brutally murdered in their Range Rover one winter's evening. On their way they had built the drug-dealing organisation that which supplied the pill that killed Leah Betts. They were responsible for a wave of intimidation, beatings and murder. Until, it seems, they took one step too far. Now there is compelling evidence that the men convicted of shooting the dead men are innocent. Which means the real murderers are still at large. Bernard O'Mahoney was a key member of what has been one of the most feared gangs of the decade. His inside account of their cold-blooded violence reveals that facts can be more terryfing than fiction.

Essex Boys

A Terrifying Expose Of The British Drugs Scene

John Burrowes

Not only has Glasgow produced some incredible personalities, it has also been witness to some of the greatest happenings of our times. These outstanding people and epoch-making events are featured in Glasgow: Tales of the City. 
 
 As a result of painstaking research, some startling new facts have emerged about the life and times of some of the city's most interesting characters. The many individuals documented in this book include the world's greatest pilot, whose many flying feats are still held in great awe today and unlikely ever to be repeated. He was hailed as a hero in America, they gave a him a ticker-tape reception in New York and Hollywood begged him to be a star. 
 
 More recently, Glasgow was popularised by a TV programme about the city's tough police officer Taggart. The role of the Glasgow detective made Mark McManus one of Scotland's first international TV stars, and Mark's own life story makes equally compelling reading. 
 
 Before Billy Connolly, Glasgow's greatest-ever comedian was Lex McLean. He smashed all the box-office records in a Glasgow theatre and became a legend in his own lifetime. His story has never before been told in such detail. 
 
 This is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating studies of Scotland's largest city ever published.

Glasgow

Tales of the City

Sebastian Williams

Send Them to Hell is a horrifying, authentic chronicle of life as lived by foreign inmates over the past two decades in Bangkok's notorious prison system. 
 
Murder, human-rights abuse, drugs, blackmail, extortion, extreme violence, medical maltreatment and unjustifiable death penalties feature as everyday occurrences in the living hells that are Bangkwang and Klong Prem jails. 
 
 Sebastian Williams has graphically revealed this shocking reality through the eyes of a long-term inmate from the West who endured at first hand the unimaginable, inhuman nightmare that constitutes the Thai penal system.

Send Them to Hell

The Brutal Horrors of Bangkok's Nightmare Jails

Roy Bradford

More than half a century after his death, Lt Col. Robert Blair Mayne is still regarded as one of the greatest soldiers in the history of military special operations. He was the most decorated British soldier of the Second World War, receiving four DSOs, the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'honneur, and he pioneered tactics used today by the SAS and other special operations units worldwide. 
 
 Rogue Warrior of the SAS tells the remarkable life story of 'Colonel Paddy', whose exceptional physical strength and uniquely swift reflexes made him a fearsome opponent. But his unorthodox rules of war and his resentment of authority would deny him the ultimate accolade of the Victoria Cross. 
 
 Drawing on personal letters and family papers, declassified SAS files and records, together with the Official SAS Diary compiled in wartime and eyewitness accounts from many who served with him, the picture emerges of a soldier who, although a flawed hero, was unquestionably one of the most distinctive combatants of the campaigns in the Western Desert and Europe.

Rogue Warrior of the SAS

The Blair Mayne Legend

Christopher Parnell

Prepare yourself for a journey into the indonesian penal system, a world where murder, torture and fights to the death are the norm. 
 
Hell's Prisoner is the powerful story of one man's battle to survive in some of the world's cruellest and most inhumane prisons. Christopher Parnell, wrongly accused of drug trafficking, found himself catapulted into the maelstrom of madness and degradation that exists within Indonesian jails. Surrounded by murderers and sadistic, violent criminals, he soon learned that life can be as cheap as a bowl of rice or a cigarette. 
 
During his imprisonment, Parnell was subjected to unthinkable sessions of torture, both physical and psychological. Left to starve and fight every day for his survival, he was forced to eat everything from cockroaches to human flesh. 
 
This is an incredible tale of fatalism and bureaucracy, of corruption and the horrors of prison, but most of all it is a no-holds-barred account of what the human spirit can endure.

Hell's Prisoner

The Shocking True Story Of An Innocent Man Jailed For Eleven Years In Indonesia's Most Notorious Prisons

Nicholas Davies

This explosive book reveals the conspiracy between British Military Intelligence and the gunman of the UDA who targeted and killed both Republican terrorists and ordinary Catholics. 
 
 The secret partnership was sanctioned at the highest level of the British government and full details of planned operations, including killings, were passed directly to its Joint Intelligence Committee in London. 
 
 Ten-Thirty-Three was the codename given to the agent who was fed with all the details necessary for Loyalist gunmen to carry out their murderous activities. But somewhere along the line the power went to Ten-Thirty-Three’s head and he became increasingly unpredictable. It wasn’t long before he was completely out of control, and his Military Intelligence bosses had the makings of a major catastrophe on their hands… 
 
 This extraordinary true story lifts the lid on shocking abuses of power in Belfast in the 1980s and 1990s.

Ten-Thirty-Three

The Inside Story of Britain's Secret Killing Machine in Northern Ireland

At 16, Martha collapses on the streets, suffering from starvation and exposure. She has reached rock bottom, but after Martha is taken to hospital, Lady Luck smiles kindly on her and she is given the opportunity to get off the streets for ever. 
 
Before long, Martha is on the way to leading the normal life she has so long dreamt of. She makes friends, begins to put the misery of her past behind her and even experiences her first taste of love. 
 
For her, love is a powerful feeling. She has never experienced real affection before and is now plunged into the complex world of love between a man and a woman. The intense emotion consumes her, for this is a forbidden love that can never be requited. After all, Ralph Fitzgerald is a priest, and he will never break his vow of chastity. This love brings heartbreaking consequences and changes the direction of Martha's life for ever . . .

Ma, Now I'm Goin Up in the World

Graham Johnson

Drug dealers beware. The Devil is coming to get you. 
 
 Gangster Stephen French invented the perfect crime: robbing drug barons of their huge fortunes. In SAS-style swoops, French raided their fortified mansions and tortured them with horrifying violence until they paid up. Through 'taxing' the richest and most powerful crimelords in the UK, he netted over £20 million. 
 
 French was no ordinary criminal. He was a world-champion fighter, he studied psychology at university to master mind-control techniques, and he used the teachings of Machiavelli and samurai warriors to outwit his enemies. The Devil also reveals French's complex relationship with Curtis Warren, the wealthiest criminal in British history. The two were childhood pals, then partners and finally bitter enemies. 
 
 Now a legitimate businessman, French built up a multimillion-pound empire. Having eventually turned his back on his former life, he is now seeking to set the record straight.

The Devil

Britain's Most Feared Underworld Taxman

Maureen Coppinger

The shocking but ultimately uplifting life story of an Irish woman who endured 13 years of cruelty and injustice in an orphanage 
 
Maureen Coppinger's earliest memory is of watching the woman she believed to be her mother walk away and abandon her to the care of the nuns at one of Ireland's notorious industrial schools. She was just three years old. 
 
She remained in the orphanage until the age of 16, subjected to cruelty and neglect, and starved of love and affection. It was an environment from which no one emerged unscathed. 
 
Throughout these tormented years, Maureen dreamed only of escape, and when she was contacted again by her mammy she believed all her dreams were about to come true. Life in the outside world brought its own challenges, however, and Maureen was thrown into turmoil when she discovered that the truth about her past was more murky than she had ever realised. 
 
Annie's Girl stands apart as a poignant testimony to the resilience of the human heart. This touching and evocative memoir is the incredible story of an illegitimate industrial-school survivor's profound struggle to overcome a shame-filled past and solve the mystery of her origins. 
 
Maureen Coppinger emigrated to Canada in 1955, where she married and raised three sons. She worked as a school secretary for 25 years before retiring in 1994 and now spends her leisure time as a volunteer for the Galway Association.

Annie's Girl

How an Abandoned Orphan Finally Discovered the Truth About Her Mother

In December 1995, three key members of the infamous Essex Boys firm were executed in their Range Rover after being lured to a deserted farm track by the promise of a lucrative drug deal. The police predicted that the void left as a result of the murders would cause a gangland war that would extend across London and much of the south-east. 
 
 Essex Boys, The New Generation tells the chilling true story of the gang that destroyed everything that stood in their way to take control of their fallen predecessors' drug empire. With a reputation for ruthless violence, the gang expanded and protected their drug-dealing operation with a terrifying combination of bloodshed and intimidation. 
 
 In February 2001, tensions within their circle boiled over and resulted in one member being shot dead. The police investigation was met with a wall of silence and for three years it seemed as if the case would remain unsolved. A leading member of the gang was eventually charged, but in an unexpected twist he became the prosecution's star witness. While a murder conviction was finally secured, the real truth surrounding the murder and the gang's psychotic crimes has never been revealed. 
 
 Now, for the first time, former Essex Boys member Bernard O'Mahoney tells the full, extraordinary story of the rise and fall of the gang that took over the Essex underworld from him and his associates.

Essex Boys, The New Generation

Tim Newark

Charles 'Lucky' Luciano was a vicious mobster who rose to become the multimillionaire king of the New York underworld. He was a legend - but also a fake master criminal without real power, his reputation manipulated and maintained by the government agents who had put him behind bars. 
 
Drawing on secret government documents from archives in America and Europe, this myth-busting biography tells Luciano's real story, from his early days as a top hit man for the mob to his exploits running sex and narcotics empires and revelations about his trip to Nazi Germany to set up a drugs importing racket. His career abruptly halted by imprisonment, Luciano's reputation was enhanced by rumours that he was helping to win the Second World War for the Allies in Sicily and the Mediterranean. Through painstaking research, Newark exposes the truth about what Luciano really did during the war. 
 
Expelled from the US in 1946, Luciano returned to Italy, where he was reputed to head a massive transatlantic narcotics network. In a complex conspiracy, he became a victim of the far greater powers around him, and Newark provides evidence that, at one time, he was even working as a Cold War agent, helping the US government fight Communism in Sicily. Lucky Luciano: Mafia Murderer and Secret Agent turns accepted Mafia history on its head with an extraordinary story that has never been told before.

Lucky Luciano

Mafia Murderer and Secret Agent

Claude Choules

Before his death at the age of 110 in May 2011, Claude Choules was the last man alive who had served in both world wars. 
 
Claude learned life's lessons during a rural childhood in England and later in the Royal Navy as a boy sailor, before graduating to become an explosives expert in the Australian navy. 
 
In his 80s, Claude began working on his memoirs with the help of his daughters, and The Last of the Last is a riveting account of his lifetime that vividly mirrors how the last century unfolded. 
 
Claude had the insight of an ordinary man thrust to the forefront of international furore. He was opposed to the glorification of war, but his charming anecdotes honour a generation called upon to serve not once but twice. This engaging, wryly humorous autobiography reflects the amiable nature of a truly unique man.

The Last of the Last

The Final Survivor of the First World War

Louise Monaghan

In the middle of one of the worst civil wars in Syria's history, Louise Monaghan crossed a heavily guarded border to save her six-year-old daughter from the father who had callously snatched her from her home in Cyprus. Not knowing what lay ahead, the Irish mother tricked her ex-husband into believing she still loved him and wanted them to live together as a family, purely so that she could see her kidnapped child again. 
 
Once in his homeland, Louise too was held captive, locked inside a run-down house day and night with little food and no hope of being released. Sick from polluted water, severely beaten by her ex-husband and abandoned by the Turkish men paid to rescue her, she took her little girl and made a daring escape. 
 
The journey they made through bomb attacks and sniper fire, and across a heavily patrolled mountain range in the dead of night, was a harrowing ordeal. Yet miraculously they both survived, and Stolen is Louise's breathtaking account of events.

Stolen

Escape from Syria

Aaron Edwards

Aden, 20 June 1967: two army Land Rovers burn ferociously in the midday sun. The bodies of British soldiers litter the road. Thick black smoke bellows above Crater town, home to insurgents who are fighting the British-backed Federation government. Crater had come to symbolise Arab nationalist defiance in the face of the world’s most powerful empire. 
 
Hovering 2,000 ft. above the smouldering destruction, a tiny Scout helicopter surveys the scene. Its passenger is the recently arrived Commanding Officer of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Lieutenant-Colonel Colin Mitchell. Soon the world’s media would christen him ‘Mad Mitch’, in recognition of his controversial reoccupation of Crater two weeks later. 
 
Mad Mitch was truly a man out of his time. Supremely self-confident and debonair, he was an empire builder, not dismantler, and railed against the national malaise he felt had gripped Britain’s political establishment. Drawing on a wide array of never-before-seen archival sources and eyewitness testimonies, Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law tells the remarkable story of inspiring leadership, loyalty and betrayal in the final days of British Empire. It is, above all, a shocking account of Britain’s forgotten war on terror.

Mad Mitch's Tribal Law

Aden and the End of Empire

W Fellows

Think about the most wretched day of your life. Maybe it was when someone you loved died, or when you were badly hurt in an accident, or a day when you were so terrified you could scarcely bear it. No imagine 4,000 of those days in one big chunk. 
 
 In 1978, Warren Fellows was convicted in Thailand of heroin trafficking and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The Damage Done is his story of an unthinkable nightmare in a place where sewer rats and cockroaches are the only nutritious food, and where the worst punishment is the khun deo - solitary confinement, Thai style. 
 
 Fellows was certainly guilty of his crime, but he endured and survived human-rights abuses beyond imagination. This is not his plea for forgiveness, nor his denial of guilt; it is the story of an ordeal that no one would wish on their worst enemy. It is an essential read: heartbreaking, fascinating and impossible to put down.

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