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May 1945: In the aftermath of the Second World War, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen. One of the lead investigators is Lieutenant Hanns Alexander, a German Jew who is now serving in the British Army. Rudolf Höss is his most elusive target. Hanns and Rudolf reveals for the very first time the full, exhilarating account of Höss' capture, an encounter with repercussions that echo to this day.

Hardy's first major literary success, here brought to life by narrator Nathaniel Parker, is the story of the independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene, who inherits her uncle's farm, the largest estate in the area. She surprises the villagers of Weatherbury by deciding to run it herself. Attracted to this bold young woman are three suitors all vying for her affections. They include the lonely gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the young and handsome but inconsiderate Sergeant Troy and the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak.

When Thomas Harding discovered that his mother's family had made money from the slave plantations worked by people of African descent, what began as an interrogation into the choices of his ancestors soon became a quest to learn more about Britain's role in slavery. It was a history that he knew surprisingly little about. In White Debt, Harding vividly brings to life the story of the uprising by enslaved people that took place in the British colony of Demerara (now Guyana) in the Caribbean in 1823.

In The Einstein Vendetta, Thomas Harding recounts the story of an unthinkable crime, one that unspools to reveal Italy’s brutal wartime history – its fall to fascism, antisemitism and bitter partisanship – and a family’s search for justice. Vividly told, drawing on previously unpublished archival sources and first-hand accounts, Harding threads history and detective story to build an unquiet, haunting testimony.

In the early 1800s Lehmann Gluckstein and his family escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and made their way to Whitechapel in the East End of London. There, starting with nothing, they worked tirelessly to pull themselves out of poverty, creating a small tobacco factory that quickly grew to become the largest catering company in the world: J. Lyons. For over a century, Lyons was everywhere. Its restaurants and corner houses were on every high street, its coffee and tea in every cup, its products in every home. The company transformed the way we eat, drink and are entertained.

Hanns Alexander was the son of a wealthy German family who fled Berlin for London in the 1930s. Rudolf Höss was a farmer and soldier who became Kommandant of Auschwitz and oversaw the deaths of over a million people. In the aftermath of World War II, the first British War Crimes Investigation Team is assembled to hunt down the senior Nazi officials responsible for the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen.

Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear.

It is the early 1950s. A nameless man is found on the steps of the hospital in Iasi, Romania. He is deaf and mute, but a young nurse named Safta recognizes him from the past and brings him paper and pencils so that he might draw. Gradually, memories appear on the page: The man is Augustin, the cook's son at the manor house at Poiana, where Safta was the privileged daughter.

Two guys and a girl just hanging out and asking the people questions about life. Fun times only

Thomas Harding kannte seinen Großonkel Hanns Alexander als einen freundlichen Mann mit viel Familiensinn, der ein bürgerliches Leben als Bankangestellter in London geführt hatte, sich für die Synagoge engagierte und gerne Witze machte. Seine jüdische Familie stammte aus Berlin und war in den 1930er-Jahren in letzter Minute nach England ins Exil entkommen. Das wussten alle. Ansonsten wurde über den Krieg nicht gesprochen. Erst nach dem Tod von Hanns Alexander erfuhr Harding, dass er ein Nazijäger gewesen war.

In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding travelled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a house by a lake. It had been a holiday home for her family, that she had been forced to leave as the Nazis swept to power. As he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived, he realised that this house had witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, had withstood the trauma of a world war and the dividing of a nation.

At the height of the Vietnam conflict, a complex system of secret underground tunnels sprawled from Cu Chi Province to the edge of Saigon. In these burrows, the Viet Cong cached their weapons, tended their wounded, and prepared to strike. They had only one enemy: US soldiers small and wiry enough to maneuver through the guerrillas’ narrow domain. The brave souls who descended into these hellholes were known as “tunnel rats”. Armed with only pistols and K-bar knives, these men inched their way through the steamy darkness where any number of horrors could be awaiting them.

Here is a fiction debut that is cause for celebration. Growing up in a family that valued the art of storytelling and the power of oral history, Thomas Steinbeck now follows in his father's footsteps with a brilliant collection. In seven stories, Steinbeck traces the fates and dreams of an eccentric cast of characters, from sailors and ranchers to doctors and immigrants - as each struggles to carve out a living in the often inhospitable environment of rocky cliffs, crashing surf, and rough patches of land along the California coast.

In 1616 an English whaling ship heads for home, leaving behind the quiet, headstrong Thomas Cave, who has bet the rest of the crew that he can spend a winter on an Arctic island - alone. But nothing so threatens the sailor as his own mind, haunted by the remembrances of another life and a lost love.

After arriving in London just before the Second World War as a penniless and friendless Austrian-Jewish refugee, George Weidenfeld went on to transform not only the world of publishing but the culture of ideas. The books that he published include momentous titles such as Lolita, Double Helix, The Group and The Hedgehog and the Fox, with authors he championed ranging from Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy and Edna O'Brien to Henry Miller, Harold Wilson, Saul Bellow and Henry Kissinger.

President Warren G. Harding faced a wrecked economy in the after­math of World War I and a period of intense fear and suspicion of foreign threats. Despite a Supreme Court that continued to countenance the sup­pression of citizens’ speech under the First Amendment, Harding bucked his advisers and commuted the sentence of Socialist activist Eugene V. Debs.

In 1906, the Chinese in California lived in the shadows. Their alien customs, traditions, and language hid what they valued from their neighbors . . . and left them open to scorn and prejudice. Their communities were ruled — and divided — by the necessity of survival among the many would-be masters surrounding them, by struggles between powerful tongs, and by duty to their ancestors.

It is August 1616. The whaling ship Heartsease has ventured high into the Arctic, and the crew must return home before the ice closes in. All, that is, save Thomas Cave. He makes a wager that he will remain there alone until next season, though no man has yet been known to have survived a winter this far north. So he is left with provisions, shelter, and a journal - should he not live to tell the tale.

June 2006: Allan Chappelow, an award-winning photographer and biographer, was found battered to death, partially burned and buried under four feet of paper at his house in Hampstead. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam - a man who claimed to be a key negotiator in the Tiananmen Square protests. Thomas Harding has spent the past two years investigating the case, described by the press as 'the greatest whodunnit' of recent years, and has unearthed shocking and revelatory new material on the killing.

Whoever is born here is doomed to stay until death. Whoever comes to stay never leaves. Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a 17th-century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Blind and silenced, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's beds for nights on end. So accustomed to her have the townsfolk become that they often forget she's there. Or what a threat she poses.