Showing titles in 20th Century

USS Bull Shark is running for Pearl Harbor after leaving New London and her victory over the Nazi Q-ship, but all is not well aboard the boat. The Japanese are planning a major offensive and the clock is rapidly ticking – with what will become one of the most decisive battles of the war looming on the horizon, the Navy still doesn’t know exactly where or when it’s going to happen. Can Bull Shark play her part in the Battle of Midway? Or will she meet with Yamamoto’s secret weapon and be swept aside in Japan’s quest for power?

Roisin O'Byrne, a young lawyer with a passion for protecting the Darling River where her family has lived for almost two hundred years, finds herself embroiled in a battle. Her commitment to environmental justice pits her against formidable adversaries within the corporate landscape, working with her enigmatic boss Seth Brodie. As her family continue their quest to uncover the history of the settlement of Ceann Mara and the hidden life of one of its first settlers, Samuel O'Byrne, Roisin plunges deeper into the murky waters of corporate interests and corruption.

Paris, 1942: Anabel Martinet is a jewel thief, descended from a family that has spent centuries stealing from the unkind and giving to the deserving. Never has that mattered more than now, in the midst of the Nazi Occupation, and despite the enormous risks, Anabel begins stealing from Germans and collaborators and funnelling money to the French Resistance. But when she takes a pair of valuable bracelets from a high-ranking Nazi officer, she finds herself - and her two young daughters - in the line of fire from the Germans, with devastating consequences.

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event that tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. Nearly 80 years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childhood. When a couple moves into the flat below her in her London mansion block, it should be nothing more than a momentary inconvenience. However, the appearance of their nine-year-old son, Henry, brings back memories she would rather forget.

The story is told by a young 'unknown soldier' in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. Through his eyes we see all the realities of war: under fire, on patrol, waiting in the trenches, at home on leave, and in hospitals and dressing stations. Although there are vividly described incidents which remain in the mind, there is no sense of adventure here, only the feeling of youth betrayed and a deceptively simple indictment of war—of any war—told for a whole generation of victims.

In the midst of WWII, an English mother, Norah, places her eight-year-old daughter on a ship leaving Malaya, desperate to keep her safe from the Japanese army as they move down through the Pacific. In Singapore, a Welsh-Australian nurse, Nesta, has enlisted to tend to Allied troops. But as the island falls to the Japanese she joins the terrified cargo of people, including the heartbroken Norah, crammed aboard the Vyner Brooke merchant ship. Only two days later, they are bombarded from the air off the coast of Indonesia, and in a matter of hours, the Vyner Brooke lies broken on the seabed.

It's been fifteen years since Belinda was convicted of her husband's murder. Now, she's ready for her life to begin again, and she's set on that happening at Sunnyside Home for the Young at Heart. The owner, Mabel, has spent her life here. First as an evacuee during the Blitz and now as the care home's oldest resident, Mabel has held the secrets of this house for as long as she can remember. Secrets that could kill if in the wrong hands. But history won't stay hidden forever and someone is onto them both.

Charlie Matters' life has always been a fight for survival. Orphaned with no prospects, Charlie steals what he needs, living day-to-day until he can enlist in the battle against the Germans.

It is just before the outbreak of World War I, and Britain must enlist the aid of Russia. Czar Nicholas' nephew is to visit London for secret naval talks with Lord Walden, who has lived in Russia and has a Russian wife, Lydia. But there are other people who are interested in the arrival of Prince Alexei: the Waldens' only daughter, Charlotte - wilful, idealistic, and with an awakening social conscience; Basil Thompson, head of the Special Branch; and, above all, Feliks Kschessinky, the ruthless Russian anarchist.

Paris, 1944: The war is nearly over, but for members of the Resistance in occupied France, it is more dangerous than ever before. Twenty-five-year-old Gabby Foucher loathes the Nazis, though as the concierge of 10 rue Royale, she does her best to avoid conflict - unlike her bolder sister Yvette, who finds trouble at every turn.

September 3, 1939, the day of the Spanish exiles’ splendid arrival in Chile, the Second World War broke out in Europe. Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever changed. Together with his sister-in-law, the pianist Roser Bruguera, he is forced out of his beloved Barcelona and into exile.

The second book in Jeffrey Archer’s highly acclaimed The Clifton Chronicles, The Sins of the Father takes the reader on a breath-taking journey from the backstreets of Bristol to the boardrooms of Manhattan.The book opens in New York, 1939. Harry Clifton, under the new identity of Tom Bradshaw, finds himself arrested for first degree murder.

Morocco, 1928. Eighteen-year-old Frenchwoman Marie-Madeleine is not the kind of woman who goes through life sitting down, something her new husband can attest.

Three very different women are recruited to the mysterious Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla has the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses - but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, working to translate decoded enemy secrets. Self-made Mab masters the legendary codebreaking machines as she conceals old wounds and the poverty of her East-End London upbringing. And shy local girl Beth is the outsider who trains as one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts.

Her beauty almost certainly saved her from the rising Nazi party and led to marriage with an Austrian arms dealer. Underestimated in everything else, she overheard the Third Reich's plans while at her husband's side, understanding more than anyone would guess. She devised a plan to flee in disguise from their castle, and the whirlwind escape landed her in Hollywood. She became Hedy Lamarr, screen star.

In 1914, when the war draws the young men of Britain away to fight, it is the women who must keep the nation running. Two of those women are Peggy and Maude, twin sisters who work in the bindery at Oxford University Press in Jericho. Peggy is intelligent, ambitious and dreams of going to Oxford University, but for most of her life she has been told her job is to bind the books, not read them. Maude, meanwhile, wants nothing more than what she has. She is extraordinary but vulnerable. Peggy needs to watch over her.

It's 1942. America have just joined the war. Greyhound, an international convoy of 37 allied ships, is in operation. As Captain Ernest Krause leads his first command of a US destroyer, the convoy ploughs through icy, submarine-infested North Atlantic seas. All the while hotly pursued by wolf packs of Nazi U-boats. Grappling with his newfound superiority and haunting self-doubt in 48 hours of desperate peril, Captain Krause's hopeless mission is doomed to fail. But armed with extraordinary courage and grit, hope may just be on the horizon.

The Battle of Britain defined the future for Britain, Europe, and America. Bluebirds tells the story of four ordinary young men who are thrown together as Hitler plunges the European continent into its darkest hours. Andrew Francis and Gerry Donaldson were born on different sides of the Atlantic just before The Great War. Together with the mildly psychotic Bryan Hale, they fly Spitfires through the summer of 1940.

English girl Sheila Matthews accepts an invitation to holiday in Poland, the country where her father died in mysterious circumstances. When German bombers begin pounding Warsaw, she decides against returning home and is recruited by the Polish underground. Playing a dangerous game as a double agent, Sheila must use all her skill to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo. But soon the Germans begin to suspect her and she flees to the forest, to be reunited with the enigmatic Captain Adam Wisniewski, now a wanted partisan.

In the early morning hours of 6th November 1943, SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, receives the coded message he has been waiting for, 'the Eagle has landed.' It was to become known as the most daring enemy mission of the entire war: Operation Eagle, Himmler's audacious plan to kidnap Winston Churchill on British soil. But, despite spectacular secrecy, there was to be no surrender without a fight. For in that remote corner of Norfolk, an elite unit is gathered together. Ready to do battle for a nation against the most ruthless taskforce ever assembled.