Time period: 20th century

This is the incredible story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the WW2 female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo. Agent Zo was the only woman to reach London from Warsaw during the Second World War as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and then in Britain she became the only woman to join the Poli...

As the horrors of fascism ran riot through Europe in the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans, most of them Jewish and many of them artists, fled their countries seeking sanctuary in an imperial island at the edge of the continent. The world they found when they reached these shores - da...

This volume unbuttons the multi-layered, hundred-year-history of women's lives through fashion and beauty from 1860 to 1960. At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than...

In 1977, in an Ohio Amish community, pregnant wife and mother Ida Stutzman perished during a barn fire. The coroner's report: natural causes. Ida's husband, Eli, was never considered a suspect. But when he eventually rejected the faith and took his son, Danny, with him, murder followed. What real...

Taking in old age, the context of one's life and times, memory, reading and writing, and the identifying cargo of possessions - two ammonites, a cat, a pair of American ducks and a leaping fish sherd, amongst others - this is an elegant, moving and deeply enjoyable memoir by one of our most loved...

Dear reader, if you are looking for a passionate romance, a slick political thriller or, perhaps, a ripping yarn with volcanos, pirates and ghosts; a book where everything ends neatly and makes perfect, unequivocal sense, then I'm afraid this is not the book you're looking for. If you like storie...

A bestseller translated into several languages and the inspiration for a whole genre of confessional memoirs, this book is an extraordinary portrait of family life, father-son relationships and bereavement.

Writer, artist, and filmmaker, Chris Shepherd's debut graphic novel depicts a coming of age story centred around growing up in the working-class dynamics of Merseyside in the late eighties. As Conor Sterling is about to turn 18, he wrestles with the tough choice to go to art college or look after...

In the early sixties, Victor 'Lucky' Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill - then as a rent collector for an unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman. Shadowing Lucky from his early struggles in L...

Between 1941 and 1945, more than 800 shiploads of supplies were delivered to the Soviet Union protected by allied naval forces. Each journey was a battle against the elements, with turbulent seas, extreme cold, and the constant dread of torpedoes. These Arctic convoys have been mythologized as de...

'Art Deco by the Sea' is a major new book and exhibition examining British coastal culture between the First and Second World Wars. Beautifully illustrated, the book will trace how the British seaside changed during a new age of mass tourism. It will examine how coastal resorts developed and how ...

Provence, 1920. Ettie moves through the remote farmhouse, silently creating the conditions that make her uncle's artistic genius possible. Joseph, an aspiring journalist, has been invited to the house. He believes he'll make his name by interviewing the reclusive painter, the great Edouard Tartuf...

For decades, the Kennedy name has been synonymous with wealth, power, and - above all else - integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the Kennedy men's legacy of physical and psychological abuse of women, part of a tradition of toxic masculinity that spans generations ...

In the summer of 1980, astrophysics professor Joan Goodwin begins training to be an astronaut at Houston's Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilots Hank Redmond and John Griffin; mission specialist Lydia Danes; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald; and Va...

Set over one long, hot summer on the New Zealand coast, a ten-year-old girl's innocent investigation into a local mystery sees the cracks within her own family start to show.

An ambitious young gardener, Robert's been offered a cottage in the grounds of Anderby Hall in return for his efforts to restore the hornbeam maze and tame the feral roses. When the residents of Greenfields discover that Mrs Fitzgerald has sold the old orchard to a property developer, who intends...

12-year-old Eliza has grown accustomed to a life of penury and servitude, her only comfort - the love and protection of her brother, Bart. One day, Bart accidentally kills a man and is forced to flee to New Zealand. Alone and at the mercy of her cruel uncle, Eliza realises that her very survival ...

How do the disillusioned, the forgotten, and the persecuted not merely hold on to life but expand its possibilities and preserve its beauty? What, in other words, does utopia look like in black? These questions animate Aaron Robertson's exploration of Black Americans' efforts to remake the condit...

In 1939 there were more than ten million children living in Britain. Their childhoods were about to beshattered by events they could neither control nor comprehend. The Second World War not only tore two million children away from their homes as evacuees, it also called on boy scouts and girl gui...

January 1943. Warsaw is a city of the dead. In the ghetto, the last 50,000 Jews await their fate but, unlike those who preceded them to the death camps, they are prepared to fight to the end. Jan Kalisz, Kripo investigator and resistance double-agent, has promised to supply them with weapons. But...