Get Lost in History: Fact & Fiction

Paris, 1942: In the midst of the Nazi Occupation, Annabel Marceau begins stealing from Germans 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, with devastating consequences.

Boston, 2018: Colette Marceau, now in her eighties, has spent a lifetime determined to find out what happened to her mother and sister that fateful night. When one of the missing bracelets surfaces at the Boston Diamond Museum, can she finally find the answers – and justice – she has been looking for?

*Published under the title The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau in the US*

A heart-wrenching and evocative dual-timeline novel, perfect for fans of Santa Montefiore, Rachel Hore, Lucinda Riley and Kristin Hannah.

Bologna, 1575.

A talented seamstress

A powerful merchant

A fierce battle of wills

Bologna, 1575. A talented seamstress. A powerful merchant. A fierce battle of wills.

Elena Morandi has gained a fragile foothold in a master tailor’s workshop, despite the profession being barred to women. But then Antonio della Fontana, a powerful man from her past, crosses her path and threatens everything she has built. Fontana has every corner of the city in his pocket and Elena knows all too well of his past abuses. Driven to fight for justice, she hatches a daring plan to get retribution for herself, a lost friend and his other victims.

The sights, sounds and textures of Renaissance Italy are brought to vivid life in this breathtaking historical fiction debut.

Summer, 1919: Constance Haverhill is forced to relinquish her beloved job – and cottage – at the estate she helped to run during the war.

Instead, she’s sent as an old lady’s companion to Hazelbourne-on-Sea, where she meets Poppy, a trouser-wearing local who runs a ladies’ motorcycle (and, hopefully soon, flying) club, and Harris, her recalcitrant but handsome brother – a pilot wounded in battle – who warms in Constance’s presence, among the other colourful inhabitants of this sunny pocket of high society.

But things are increasingly complicated. As the country prepares to celebrate peace, the women of the club are forced to confront the fact that the freedoms gained during the war are being revoked.

In a timeless comedy of manners, with sharp humour, biting wit and a warm heart, Simonson captures the mood of a generation facing the seismic changes brought on by war.

One man, one choice, two lifetimes.

In one unforgettable night, thirteen-year-old Max Spiegelman’s life splits in two.

As Max sleeps, a house fire creeps through his parents’ shop. Woken by smoke, Max manages to escape – orphaned, disfigured and adopted by an Aryan family who change his identity and his prospects.

But when he awakes a second time to smoke, he finds he has the chance to save his parents and escape unharmed, facing life as a Jew in 1930s Austria.

In each parallel universe, he is haunted by visions of what could have been. But in both worlds, he and his alter ego share a love with an enchanting, grey-eyed girl. . .

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognises Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?

In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatised man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest works of literature can achieve.

MONEY.
The object of our desires.
The engine of our genius.
Humanity’s greatest invention.

From clay tablets in Mesopotamia to today’s cryptocurrency, global economist David McWilliams takes us on an epic journey of innovation, disruption and transformation that is an astonishing new history of our species.

The question is, over 5,000 years, have we changed money – or has money changed us?

Wars are expensive, both in human terms and monetary ones. But while warfare might be costly it has also, at times, been an important driver of economic change and progress. Over the long span of history nothing has shaped human institutions – and thus the process of economic development – as much as war and violence. Wars made states and states made wars. As the costs of warfighting grew so did state structures, taxation systems and national markets for debt. And as warfare became ever more destructive the incentive for governments to resort to it changed too.

Blood and Treasure looks at the history and economics of warfare from the Viking Age to the war in Ukraine, examining how incentives and institutions have changed over time. It surveys how warfare may have driven Europe’s rise to global prominence, and it explains how the total wars of the twentieth century required a new type of strategy, one that took economics seriously.

Along the way it asks whether Genghis Khan should be regarded as the father of globalisation, explains how New World gold and silver kept Spain poor, ponders why some economists think of witch trials as a form of ‘non-price competition’, notes how pirate captains were pioneers of effective HR techniques, asks if handing out medals hurt the Luftwaffe in the Second World War and assesses if economic theories helped to create a tragedy in Vietnam. As well as considering why some medieval kings were right to arm their soldiers with inferior weapons, taking some management lessons from Joseph Stalin and asking if a culture of patronage and cronyism helped the Royal Navy rise to greatness.

Underpinning it all is a focus on how and why the economics of conflict have changed over time. Economics can help to explain war and understanding the history of warfare can help explain modern economics.

The epic story of the RAF’s legendary heavy bomber: the Avro Lancaster

The Lancaster Story takes readers on a remarkable journey through the history of an aviation icon. This is an informative and engaging account of the true workhorse of the RAF’s bomber corps and the emotional human stories of quiet courage, sacrifice, and hard work of the men and women who flew, designed, constructed and maintained it.

Between its introduction in 1942 and the end of the Second World War, the Avro Lancaster flew more than 150,000 sorties, dropped more than 600,000 tons of explosives and took the Allied fight to Nazi Germany. The ‘Lanc’ featured on some of the most daring and celebrated missions of the war, including the heroic Dambusters raid and the Operation Hydra bombing. These and many other successes came at a significant cost, however: almost half of the 7,377 Lancasters deployed into service were lost in action.

Using archival documents, letters and first-hand accounts, The Lancaster Story delivers a dramatic and vividly rendered account of the most successful RAF bomber of the Second World War. Combining individual stories into a gripping, panoramic narrative, it paints a complete portrait of the battle over Europe, and the Lancaster’s unique and decisive role in it.

Katherine Webster: dismembered and gutted her former employer, boiling the parts down into a sludge and selling it to the local pub as the ‘best dripping’.

George Joseph Smith: married several women under different aliases, only to drown each of them while they bathed.

Patrick Mahon: swept pregnant Emily Kay off her feet and brought her to his house of horrors, where he chopped her up into 37 different pieces and torched her bones.

From the torched bones to the dismembered bodies hidden in haystacks, London has been home to some of the most gruesome murders in history. Based on official case files, trial transcripts and first-hand accounts, Scotland Yard follows some of their most notorious murders to look at how they pushed the police force to its limit, forcing them to grow and develop new techniques.

Filled with stories of decapitation, public executions, poisoning and more, Scotland Yard is a fascinating look into some of the most horrific crimes in history and how they’ve shaped the police force into what it is today.

A unique new window onto Tudor life, told through ordinary people’s untimely deaths.

How did ordinary people live in Tudor England? This unique history unearths the ways they died to find out.

Uncovering thousands of coroners’ reports, An Accidental History of Tudor England explores the history of everyday life, and everyday death, in a world far from the intrigues of Hampton Court Palace, Shakespeare’s plots and the Spanish Armada. Here, farming, building and travel were dangerous. Fruit trees killed more people than guns, and sheep killed about the same number as coalmines. Men stabbed themselves playing football and women drowned in hundreds fetching water. Going to church had its dangers, especially when it came to bell-ringing, archery practice was perilous and haystacks claimed numerous victims. Restless animals roamed the roads which contained some potholes so deep men could drown, and drown they did.

From bear attacks in north Oxford to a bowls-on-ice-incident on the Thames, this book uses a remarkable trove of sources and stories to put common folk back into the big picture of Tudor England, bringing the reality of their world to life as never before.