An unforgettable, sweeping novel of espionage, love, and war that reframes our understanding of the first half of the twenthieth century.Born into an aristocratic German Jewish family, Ernst Baerwald is a gifted linguist, talented musician, and fearless idealist. When he’s recruited in 1900 to become a spy—his cover working for a company that would become the notorious chemical conglomerate IG Farben—his life becomes an extraordinary adventure spanning two continen...

A deeply personal nine-year account of the lives of the “anchor-outs”—an unhoused community living off the California coast on abandoned boats—that explores the struggles and resilience of those surviving on the fringes of society.In the wake of the financial crisis, the number of anchor-outs living in Richardson Bay more than doubles as their long-simmering feud with the wealthy residents of Marin County—one of the richest counties in the country—finally boils ove...

An unforgettable, sweeping novel of espionage, love, and war that reframes our understanding of the first half of the twenthieth century.Born into an aristocratic German Jewish family, Ernst Baerwald is a gifted linguist, talented musician, and fearless idealist. When he’s recruited in 1900 to become a spy—his cover working for a company that would become the notorious chemical conglomerate IG Farben—his life becomes an extraordinary adventure spanning two continen...

Bloomsbury presents Shadowlands by Anthony McCann, read by David Baerwald.Los Angeles Times BestsellerAn “epic exploration” of the 2016 right-wing Oregon Occupation—"an excellent microcosm by which we might better understand our difficult national history and distressing political moment” (Maggie Nelson).In 2016, a group of armed, divinely inspired right-wing protestors led by Ammon Bundy occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the high desert of eastern Or...

Bill Bryson’s The Body meets Mary Roach’s Gulp (with a dash of What’s Your Poo Telling You?)in this delightfully weird, richly informative, and unexpectedly lyrical tour of our bodily emissions—revealing that the very parts of us that we seek to hide in embarrassment are actually an essential part of human health, with fascinating social history.In biology class, we learn that the body is a fundamentally cohesive organism, a collection of...

****Shortlisted for the 2025 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize**The bestselling author of Your Inner Fish takes readers on an epic adventure to the North and South Poles to reveal the secrets locked in the ice about life, the cosmos, and our planet’s future.“Urgent [and] prescient…The book captures Shubin’s reverence for both the beauty and the mysteries hidden in the cold, barren tundra.”—The New Yorker**Renowned scientist Neil Shubin has m...

A groundbreaking, breathtaking history of the Chinese workers who built the Transcontinental Railroad, helping to forge modern America only to disappear into the shadows of history until now.From across the sea, they came by the thousands, escaping war and poverty in southern China to seek their fortunes in America. Converging on the enormous western worksite of the Transcontinental Railroad, the migrants spent years dynamiting tunnels through the snow-packed cliff...

The New York Times-bestselling final book by the beloved, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz.With Spying on the South, the best-selling author of Confederates in the Attic returns to the South and the Civil War era for an epic adventure on the trail of America's greatest landscape architect. In the 1850s, the young Frederick Law Olmsted was adrift, a restless farmer and dreamer in search of a mission. He found it during an extr...

The untold story of the little-known Manhattan slave rebellion of 1741 and the white hysteria that resulted.

**"A treasure of a book."—David McCulloughThe harrowing story of a pathbreaking naval expedition that set out to map the entire Pacific Ocean, dwarfing Lewis and Clark with its discoveries, from the New York Times bestselling author of Valiant Ambition and In the Hurricane's Eye.**A New York Times Notable BookAmerica's first frontier was not the West; it was the sea, and no one writes more eloquently about that wa...

A groundbreaking and superlatively accurate new translation of Laozi’s The Dao De Jing, from the bestselling translator of The Art of War, promising to be the first English edition based on direct translation from the oldest known copies of the ancient Chinese text.One of the most significant and popular books in the history of human thought, and China’s earliest philosophical classic, The Dao De Jing has served for millennia as a brillia...

A myth-shattering view of the medieval Islamic world’s myriad scientific innovations, which preceded—and enabled—the European RenaissanceThe Arabic legacy of science and philosophy has long been hidden from the West. British-Iraqi physicist Jim Al-Khalili unveils that legacy to fascinating effect by returning to its roots in the hubs of Arab innovation that would advance science and jump-start the European Renaissance. Inspired by the Koranic injunction to study cl...