In War time Europe Dutch diplomat Oscar Verschuur has been posted to neutral Switzerland. His family is spread across Europe. His wife Kate works as a nurse in London and their daughter Emma is living in Berlin with her husband Carl, a "good" German who works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Briefly reunited with her father in a restaurant in Geneva, Emma drops a bombshell. A date and a codename, and the fate of nations is placed in Verschuur's hands: June 22, Barbarossa....

A masterpiece of literary craft and concision; sparse, beautiful and hugely affecting - Daily MailSince the liberation of the Netherlands, Emma Verweij has been living in Rotterdam, in a street which became a stronghold of friendships for its inhabitants during the Second World War. She marries Bruno, they have two sons, and she determines to block out the years she spent in Nazi Berlin during the war, with her first husband Carl.But now, ninety-si...

One summer's afternoon in 1981, a factory owner, Christiaan Dudok, is found dead in his study having taken his own life. He has left no suicide note, but on his desk is a newspaper from 2 April 1942, reporting on the bombing of the north German town of Lübeck. The list of the dead includes the highlighted name of Julia Bender. As a young man finishing his studies in Lübeck in 1938, Christiaan is irresistibly drawn to Julia, a courageous German who has emphatically rejected the Nazi regime....

In January 1935, Rob leaves Holland for Cape Town, a young man thirsting for adventure and wanting above all to leave his family's suffocating hold on him behind. After a brutal stint in the diamond mines, he sails to Java to join the Dutch forces in their last stand against the invading Japanese. Here he finds Guus, a fellow countryman and the best friend he will ever have.Elegant, painterly and poetic, Man on the Move is an unforgettable portrait of friendship, and the heart-wren...

Widely publicised disasters serve as a reminder to the maritime profession of the eminent need for enhancing safety cost-effectively and as a strong indicator of the existing gaps in the stability safety of ships and ocean vehicles. The problem of ship stability is so complex that practically meaningful solutions are feasible only through close international collaboration and concerted efforts by the maritime community, deriving from sound scientific approaches. Responding to this and buil...

Cambridge, Budapest, New York, Zurich, The Hague, Tel Aviv, the South Downs of England: the narrator has travelled everywhere. He has observed some of the major upheavals of the century - the Six Day War, the Prague Spring - and collected friends, lovers, and passions every step of the way. As he ages, the memories of his past grow sharper, the events of his childhood more vivid - so vivid, in fact, that his present life recedes into oblivion. He inhabits a world of ghosts and shadows and ...

Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read"One of the most—if not the most—beloved of American novels." —The New YorkerHarper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatredOne of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into mo...

In 1933, the eighteen year old Patrick Leigh Fermor set out in a pair of hobnailed boots to chance and charm his way across Europe, like a tramp, a pilgrim or a wandering scholar . The books he later wrote about this walk, A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, and the posthumous The Broken Road are a half-remembered, half-reimagined journey through cultures now extinct, landscapes irrevocably altered by the traumas of the twentieth century. Aged eighteen, Nick Hunt read A Time ...

Bruno Schulz has foreseen catastrophe and is almost paralysed by fear. His last chance of survival is to leave the home town to which, despite being in his late forties, he clings as if to a comforting blanket. So he retreats into his cellar (and sometimes hides under his desk) to write a letter to Thomas Mann: appealing to the literary giant to help him find a foreign publisher, in order that the reasons to leave Drohobych will finally outweigh the reasons to stay.Evoking Bulgakov ...

During the Second World War Eric Lomax was forced to work on the notorious Burma-Siam Railway and was tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio.Left emotionally scarred and unable to form normal relationships, Lomax suffered for years until, with the help of his wife, Patti Lomax, and of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, he came terms with what happened. Fifty years after the terrible events, he was able to meet one of his tormentors.The...

They came from space, these alien invaders, riding ships like fireballs into the seas and oceans of the Earth. Then they emerged from the depths to wreck havoc on human civilization.This brilliant science fiction novel, first published in 1953, is another tale of the end of civilization as we know it, from the author of The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE'A passionately detailed portrait of individuals struggling to snatch order and happiness from frightening, irrational times' Sunday Telegraph'Mawer embeds...provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting....[a] gorgeous novel' Washington PostCool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wi...