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Winner of the 2015 CWA Endeavour Dagger for Historical Fiction London, 1654. Oliver Cromwell is at the height of his power and has declared himself Lord Protector. Yet he has many enemies, at home and abroad. London is a complex web of spies and merchants, priests and soldiers, exiles and...

The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so...

It has long been a maxim that it is easy to forget when one is at war who the enemy really is, and that can certainly be said for the Ebola virus, which recently catapulted into headlines and instantly became the most feared disease in the world. In the case of the fight against Ebola, the enemy is not the person who has contracted the disease, nor is it the region where the virus has flourished. The enemy is a microscopic virus that, when seen under sufficient magnification, looks like a piece of loosely knotted rope.

Relli, a Jewish girl in Poland, was denied a normal childhood. When Relli was just a baby, the Nazis occupied Poland and she, together with her parents, were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, a way station before death. Her parents correctly assessed the new situation and decided to act heroically in order to save their only child. They succeeded in smuggling her out of the Ghetto and entrusted her to a Gentile Polish couple who agreed to hide her for the duration of the war under a false identity.

Ten thousand Allied troops landed in the Netherlands in September 1944. This was the largest airborne invasion ever undertaken and it ended in utter disaster. Eight thousand men were killed, wounded, or captured during the Battle of Arnhem. Yet, what of those who escaped? And how did they manage it when surrounded by German troops? Leo Heaps' remarkable book, The Grey Goose of Arnhem, charts the activities of 250 men who, with the aid of Dutch Resistance, made it back across the Rhine to Allied lines.

Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.

How did a land and people of such immense diversity come together under a banner of freedom and equality to form one of the most remarkable nations in the world? Everyone from young adults to grandparents will be fascinated by the answers uncovered in James West Davidson's vividly told A Little History of the United States.

This is the story of two men, and the two decisions, that transformed world history in a single tumultuous year, 1917: Wilson’s entry into World War One and Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution. In April 1917 Woodrow Wilson, champion of American democracy but also segregation; advocate for free...

A real life Queen’s Gambit, this captivating memoir tells the story of one of the most renowned women in chess history, Susan Polgar, taking on a sexist establishment and rewriting the rules of what women could achieve against the oppressive backdrop of Cold War Eastern Europe. Born to a poor...

What is the mind? How does it relate to the body and soul? These questions were as perplexing for the Elizabethans as they are for us today—although their answers were often startlingly different. Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed the mind was governed by the humors and passions, and was susceptible to the Devil’s interference. In this insightful and wide-ranging account, Helen Hackett explores the intricacies of Elizabethan ideas about the mind.

Immigration is a simple economic equation, but its effects are complex. Sharply written and brilliantly clarifying, Exodus offers a provocative analysis of an issue that affects us all. It is one of the most pressing and controversial questions of our time - vehemently debated, steeped in ideology, profoundly divisive. Drawing on original research and case studies, Collier explores this volatile issue from three perspectives: that of the migrants themselves, that of the people they leave behind and that of the host societies where they relocate.

From the Somme to Gallipoli to the home front, First World War for Dummies provides an authoritative, accessible, and engaging introduction to the War to End All Wars. It takes a global perspective of this global conflict, proving insight into the actions and motivations of the participants and how each nation's story fits into the wider one.

A major historical biography of George C. Marshall—the general who ran the U.S. campaign during the Second World War, the Secretary of State who oversaw the successful rebuilding of post-war Europe, and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—and the first to offer a complete picture of his life...

John “Iwan” Demjanjuk was at the center of one of history’s most complex war crimes trials. But why did it take almost sixty years for the United States to bring him to justice as a Nazi collaborator? The answer lies in the annals of the Cold War, when fear and paranoia drove American politicians and the U.S. military to recruit “useful” Nazi war criminals to work for the United States in Europe as spies and saboteurs, and to slip them into America through loopholes in U.S. immigration policy.

As a reporter, Jacques Peretti has spent his life investigating important stories. But there was one story, heard in scattered fragments throughout his childhood, that he never thought to investigate. The story of how his mother survived Auschwitz. In the few last months of the Second World War, 13-year-old Alina Peretti, along with her mother and sister, was one of 13,000 non-Jewish Poles sent to Auschwitz. Her experiences there cast a shadow over the rest of her life. Now 90, Alina has been diagnosed with dementia.

Shocking real-life stories of murderous women who used rat poison to rid themselves of husbands and other inconvenient family members. After World War II, Sydney experienced a crime wave that was chillingly calculated. Discontent mixed with despair, greed with callous disregard. Women who had lost their wartime freedoms headed back into the kitchen with sinister intent and the household poison thallium, normally used to kill rats, was repurposed to kill husbands and other inconvenient family members.

Former Marine and Pacific War veteran Robert Leckie tells the story of the invasion of Okinawa, the closing battle of World War II. Leckie is a skilled military historian, mixing battle strategy and analysis with portraits of the men who fought on both sides to give the listener a complete account of the invasion. Lasting eighty-three days and surpassing D-Day in both troops and material used, the Battle of Okinawa was a decisive victory for the Allies, and a huge blow to Japan. In this stirring account, Leckie provides a complete picture of the battle and its context in the larger war.

Stephen E. Ambrose’s D-Day is the definitive history of World War II’s most pivotal battle, a day that changed the course of history. D-Day is the epic story of men at the most demanding moment of their lives, when the horrors, complexities, and triumphs of life are laid bare. Distinguished...

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. These changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.

In The Crash of Flight 3804, Investigative Journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies - the British, the French, and the Russians - in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through vivid storytelling, extensive research, and deep analysis of region-defining maps, she reveals how feverish competition among intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks and targeted killings that continue to this day.