A haunting novel about art and its power to heal, J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.' One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives...

'I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank's diary, only published nearly a hundred years before' - Steve McQueen, director of the Academy Award-winning film of Solomun Northup's powerful memoir Solomon Northup is a free man, living in New York. Then he is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Drugged,...

Tom Holland's 'stirring new translation' (Telegraph) of Herodotus' Histories, one of the great books in Western history - now in paperback The Histories of Herodotus, completed in the second half of the 5th century BC, is generally regarded as the first work of history and the first great masterpiece of non-fiction writing. Joined here are the sheer drama of Herodotus'...

Yang Jisheng's Tombstone is the book that broke the silence on of one of history's most terrible crimes More people died in Mao's Great Famine than in the entire First World War, yet this story has remained largely untold, until now. Still banned in China, Tombstone draws on the author's privileged access to official and unofficial sources to uncover the...

Discover the extraordinary story of the woman who brought China into the modern age, from the bestselling author of Wild Swans In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Empress Dowager Cixi – the most important woman in Chinese history – brought a medieval empire into the modern age. Under her, the ancient country attained virtually all the...

Harold Nicolson was a man of extraordinary gifts. A renowned politician, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster and gardener, his position in society and politics allowed him an insight into the most dramatic events of British, indeed world, history. Nicolson's personal life was no less dramatic. Married to Vita Sackville-West, one of the most famous writers of her day,...

The Secret History of Our Streets explores six roads spread across inner London - from Camberwell, Holland Park and Islington to Shoreditch, Deptford and Bermondsey - through the experiences of the people who lived there. Stories of poverty and violence, faith, love and hope, this is an intimate examination of our capital and the changing lives of its inhabitants. The...

Robert Fortune was a Scottish gardener, botanist, plant hunter - and industrial spy. In 1848, the East India Company engaged him to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China - territory forbidden to foreigners - to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea. For centuries, China had been the world's sole tea manufacturer. Britain purchased this fuel for...

A superb account of complex psyche of Eastern Europe in the wake of the revolutions of 1989 and the opening of the communist archives. In the tradition of Timothy Garton Ash’s The File, Yale historian and prize-winning author Marci Shore draws upon intimate understanding to illuminate the afterlife of totalitarianism. The Taste of Ashes spans from Berlin to Moscow, moving...

**NOW A HIT STAGE PRODUCTION** Take a journey around the archaeological and cultural remains of Roman Britain with the award-winning author of Greek Myths. This is a book about the encounter with Roman Britain: about what the idea of 'Roman Britain' has meant to those who came after Britain's 400-year stint as province of Rome - from the medieval mythographer-historian...

'Deserves to be on the same shelf as Anne Frank's Diary and to find as huge a readership' - Philip Roth Mihail Sebastian was a promising young Jewish writer in pre-war Bucharest, a novelist, playwright, poet and journalist who counted among his friends the leading intellectuals and social luminaries of a sophisticated Eastern European culture. Because of Romania's opportunistic treatment...

The Rainborowes bridges two generations and two worlds, weaving together the lives of the Rainborowe clan as they struggle to forge a better life for themselves and a better future for humankind in the New World. Starting with William Rainborowe, a prominent merchant-mariner and shipmaster, and his equally formidable sons and daughters between 1630 and 1660, we follow their astonishing...

1919. The eyes of the world are on Paris, where statesmen, diplomats and politicians have gathered to discuss the fate of half the world’s nations in the aftermath of the cataclysm that was the Great War. A horde of journalists, spies and opportunists have also gathered in the city and the last thing the British diplomatic community needs at such...

The astonishing true story of a young woman's adventures, and misadventures, in the dangerous world of Nazi-occupied France. For Priscilla, pre-war Paris was an exciting carousel of suitors, soirées and heartbreak, and eventually a lavish wedding to a French aristocrat. But the arrival of the Nazi tanks signalled the end of life as a Vicomtesse, and the beginning of a...

The no. 1 bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel explores the profound lessons that traditional societies offer us today Over the past 500 years, the West achieved global dominance, but do Westerners necessarily have better ideas about how to raise children, care for the elderly, or simply live well? In this epic journey into our past, Jared...