In 1980, at the age of ten, Loung Ung escaped a devastated Cambodia and flew to the US as a refugee. She and her eldest brother, with whom she escaped, left behind their three surviving siblings, and her book is alternately heart-wrenching and heart-warming, as it follows the parallel lives of Loung and her closest sister, Chou, during the 15...

The Signby Thomas de Wesselow finally solves Christianity's greatest mystery 'The thinking man's Dan Brown' Sunday Times How did Christianity really begin? In this powerful and controversial book, art historian Thomas de Wesselow reveals that the answer to this puzzle lies in one of the most mysterious images in the world - the Shroud of Turin. Re-examining the Shroud and...

The Badlands by Paul French - a gripping criminal portrait of pre-communist Peking, from the interntional bestselling author of Midnight in Peking The Badlands, a warren of narrow hutongs in the eastern district of pre-communist Peking, had its heyday in the 1930s. Home to the city's drifters, misfits and the odd bohemian, it was a place of opium dens, divebars,...

Scousers believe they live in a special place, one that has more in common with Salvador da Bahia, New Orleans or Gdansk than anywhere in England, and the city has always punched above its weight. In less than a hundred years, however, Liverpool's image has declined from a major mercantile player known as the Second City of the Empire to...

These are Anthony Burgess's candid confessions: he was seduced at the age of nine by an older woman; whilst serving in Gibraltar in World War II he was thrown into jail on VE Day for calling Franco names; he once taught a group of Nazi socialites that the English equivalent of 'heil' was 'sod' and had them crying 'Sod Hitler'....

All Our Todays is the first book about the BBC's most influential news and current affairs programme, published to celebrate Today's 40th anniversary in October 1997. Paul Donovan tells the programme's story from the early days of Jack de Manio, through the great partnership of Brian Redhead and John Timpson, to the current triumvirate of Jamies Naughtie, John Humphrys and...

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Tube, the Penguin Underground Lines brings together 12 books by writers ranging from John O'Farrell to John Lanchester, Lucy Wadham to the Kids' Company Name: Penguin Underground Lines Date of Birth: will be born 7th March 2013 Vital statistics: Twelve books, one for each Underground line, to celebrate the Tube's 150th anniversary Idea...

Christopher Isherwood settled in California in 1939 and spent the war years writing for Hollywood, but by 1945 he had all but ceased to write fiction and even abandoned his habit of keeping a diary. Instead he embarked on a life of frantic socialising and drinking. Looking back from the 1970s, Isherwood recreated these years from personal memories to form...

Al Qaeda expert and CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen paints a multi-dimensional picture of the hunt for bin Laden over the past decade, as well as the recent campaign that gradually tightened the noose around him. Other key elements of the book include: * A careful account of Obama's decision-making process throughout the final weeks and days during which...

A remarkable biography of Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors, contains secrets of the royal family never previously published in this country. The lives of the Queen, Prince Philip and their children are examined and exposed in detail to reveal the Windsor family's disturbing history of adultery, jealousy and mental cruelty. Award-winning journalist Nicholas Davies examines the mood, the...

The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now largely destroyed or buried. Yet its populous river, its timbered streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul's, the devestation of the Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on for us in his etchings. Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian Tindall creates a montage of Hollar's life and times and...

Two hundred years after Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, over 27 million people worldwide languish in slavery, forced to work, under threat of violence, for no pay. In Africa, hundreds of thousands are considered chattel, while on the Indian subcontinent millions languish in generational debt bondage. Across the globe, women and children, sold for sex and...

The Bang-Bang Club was a group of four young war photographers, friends and colleagues: Ken Oosterbroek, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, war correspondants during the last years of apartheid, who took many of the photographs that encapsulate the final violent years of racist white South Africa. Two of them won Pulitzer Prizes for individual photos. Ken, the oldest...

When Gillian Tindall discovered a cache of tightly folded letters in a deserted house in central France, recently emptied of 150 years of a family's possessions, she uncovered the obscure and moving life of one woman, Celestine Chaumette. This is Tindall's brilliantly original recreation of the vanished world of a French village. ...

The inspiring story of JFK, the Cold War, and the power of oratory to change the course of history. John F. Kennedy’s last great campaign was not the battle for re-election that he did not live to wage, but the struggle for a sustainable peace with the Soviet Union. To Move the World recalls the extraordinary days from October 1962...