Historical Memoirs

Nancy Wake, nicknamed 'the white mouse' for her ability to evade capture, tells her own story. As the Gestapo's most wanted person, and one of the most highly decorated servicewomen of the war, it's a story worth telling. After living and working in Paris in the 1930's, Nancy married a wealthy Frenchman and settled in Marseilles. Her idyllic new life was ended by World War II and the invasion of France. Her life shattered, Nancy joined the French Resistance and, later, began work with an escape-route network for Allied soldiers.

Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.

Malintzin was the indigenous woman who translated for Hernando Cortes in his dealings with the Aztec emperor Moctezuma in the days of 1519 to 1521. The Spanish called her doña Marina, and she has become known to posterity as La Malinche. As Malinche, she has long been regarded as a traitor to her people, a dangerously sexy, scheming woman who gave Cortes whatever he wanted out of her own self-interest. The life of the real woman, however, was much more complicated.

From his heyday to the present moment, Al Capone - Public Enemy Number One - has gripped popular imagination. Rising from humble Brooklyn roots, Capone went on to become the most infamous gangster in American history. At the height of Prohibition, his multimillion-dollar Chicago bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling operation dominated the organized-crime scene.

George III, Britain's longest-reigning king, has gone down in history as 'the cruellest tyrant of this age' (Thomas Paine, 18th century), 'a sovereign who inflicted more profound and enduring injuries upon this country than any other modern English king' (WEH Lecky, 19th century), 'one of England's most disastrous kings' (JH Plumb, 20th century) and as the pompous, camp and sinister monarch of the musical Hamilton (21st century). Andrew Roberts' magnificent new biography takes entirely the opposite view.

Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans.

Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession is a quintessential American tale of a young man's unbridled escapades across the vastness of the Western Frontier. From humble beginnings in Boston, Chamberlain journeyed to Texas to fight in the Mexican-American War and eventually fell in with the notorious Glanton Gang, a brutal group of scalp-hunters immortalized in Cormac McCarthy's Western masterpiece Blood Meridian.

Written with an exciting combination of narrative flair and historical authority, this interpretation of the tragic life of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, breaks new ground in our understanding of the very young woman who became queen at a time of unprecedented social and political tension and whose terrible errors in judgment quickly led her to the executioner's block.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the closing years of the 10th century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthrals with its lively gossip, witty observations and subtle impressions. Lady Shōnagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose novel, The Tale of Genji, fictionalized the elite world Lady Shōnagon so eloquently relates.

Three years after her fateful journeys through the forbidding mountains of Vystrana, Mrs. Camherst defies family and convention to embark on an expedition to the war-torn continent of Eriga, home of such exotic draconian species as the grass-dwelling snakes of the savannah, arboreal tree snakes, and, most elusive of all, the legendary swamp-wyrms of the tropics. The expedition is not an easy one.

In the early 1960s, Ann Garretson sparks an airmail romance with Lieutenant Jack Sigg, a West Point grad and tank commander on the German-Czech border. Ann and Jack's correspondence heats up, and they hatch a rendezvous in Europe for the summer of 1964 to seal their budding love. A match for the ages. Not so fast. Ann's best friend in college, Terry Marshall, helps her plan the escapade, but in the weeks leading up to her trip, they realize they are more than just friends.

Lady Philippa Knolles has loved Captain Thomas "Dash" Dashwell since he first stole a kiss from her on a smuggler's beach near Hastings. Now after what seems like a lifetime of waiting, Pippin is offered a chance to renew her scandalous affair with Dash. But the man from that first heady kiss and the man she rediscovers all these years later are hardly the same. Tucked away in the back of her closet is a red dress, the one she wore long ago to win his heart....Could it have enough memories left inside it to rekindle a passion she's never forgotten?

Based on the source material for the Alec Guinness classic Kind Hearts and Coronets, Murder in the Title follows the exploits of Anton Gascoyne, a poor and distant heir to one of Britain’s great noble families, who decides to murder his way to the Gascoyne earldom. But the closer he gets to the coronet, the greater the suspicion he falls under. Will Anton get away with it? Murder in the Title will keep you guessing until the end!

In the World is the second instalment of Maxim Gorky’s autobiographical trilogy. Published in 1916, the book depicts Gorky’s experiences as a young adult, portraying his encounters with an array of characters from different social classes and conveying his observations of society at large. Gorky skilfully depicts the struggles, dreams and complexities of the lower classes, highlighting the social inequalities prevalent in Russia during the later 19th century.

Esteemed Harvard University historian and Associate Fellow Kathleen Dalton has been studying Theodore Roosevelt since 1975. This authoritative work, incorporating the latest scholarship, paints a compelling portrait of the president in all his robust glory.

For nearly three thousand years, Helen of Troy has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that it can wield. Held responsible for both the Trojan War and enduring the enmity between East and West, for millennia she has been viewed as an exquisite agent of extermination. But who was she really? Focusing on the 'real' Helen, bestselling historian Bettany Hughes reconstructs the true life for this elusive Green Bronze age princess and places her alongside the heroes and heroines of myth and history.

The definitive, fascinating, all-reaching biography of Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. Whimsical and wonderful, his work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. The silly, simple rhymes are a bottomless well of magic, his illustrations timeless favorites because, quite simply, he makes us laugh. The Grinch, the Cat in the Hat, Horton, and so many more are his troupe of beloved and uniquely Seussian creations.

At the dawn of the 20th century, humanity was facing global disaster. Mass starvation, long predicted for the fast-growing population, was about to become a reality. A call went out to the worlds scientists to find a solution. This is the story of the two enormously gifted, fatally flawed men who found it: the brilliant, self-important Fritz Haber and the reclusive, alcoholic Carl Bosch. Together they discovered a way to make bread out of air, built city-sized factories, controlled world markets, and saved millions of lives.

More than 400 years after her death, Mary Queen of Scots remains one of the most romantic and controversial figures in British history. Antonia Fraser's classic biography of her won the James Tait Prize when it was first published in 1969. It became an international best-seller and was translated into nine languages.

“Until You Are Dead” chronicles the loss of Canada’s innocence. Prior to June 11, 1959, Canadian parents could allow their children to play outdoors, unsupervised, in places children traditionally love: schoolyards, fields and nearby swimming holes. But on that hot summer day, when the body of a twelve-year-old girl turned up in a woody area near Clinton, Ontario, that innocence was shattered.