French Academician and Nazi sympathiser, Paul-Jean Husson, writes a letter to his local SS officer in the autumn of 1942.Tormented by an illicit passion for Ilse, his German daughter-in-law, Husson has taken a decision that will devastate several lives, including his own.The letter explains why. It is a dramatic and sometimes harrowing story that begins in the years leading up to the war, when the Academician's gilded existence starts to unravel. Husson's confession is a startling picture ...

“How can you do this work if you have a child?” asked her mother.“It is because I have a child that I do it,” replied Cecile. “This is not a world I wish her to grow up in.”On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war ha...

This WWII espionage biography brings "one of America's greatest spies back to life" in a "story of derring-do and white knuckles suspense" (Patrick O'Donnell, author of Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs)Virginia Hall left her comfortable Baltimore roots in 1931 with dreams of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, but her gender—and her wooden leg—kept her from pursuing politics. As Hitler advanced across Europe, she put her gift for languages to use with the B...

In his new novel, Paulo Coelho, bestselling author of The Alchemist and Adultery, brings to life one of history's most enigmatic women: Mata Hari.HER ONLY CRIME WAS TO BE AN INDEPENDENT WOMANWhen Mata Hari arrived in Paris she was penniless. Within months she was the most celebrated woman in the city.As a dancer, she shocked and delighted audiences; as a courtesan, she bewitched the era’s richest and most powerful men.But a...

NOW A MINISERIES ON BBC AMERICA STARRING DAVID TENNANTAn autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers’ bar in the city’s factory district, he will meet with the military attaché from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money. So begins The Spies of Warsaw*,* the brilliant new novel by Alan Furst, lauded by The New York Time...

From the author of the runaway bestseller A Train in Winter comes the extraordinary story of a French village that helped save thousands, including many Jewish children, who were pursued by the Gestapo during World War II.Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a small village of scattered houses high in the mountains of the Ardèche. Surrounded by pastures and thick forests of oak and pine, the plateau Vivarais lies in one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of East...

The book that helped inspire Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot SeeAn updated edition of this classic World War II memoir, chosen as one of the 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Twentieth Century, with a new photo insert and restored passages from the original French editionWhen Jacques Lusseyran was an eight-year-old Parisian schoolboy, he was blinded in an accident. He finished his schooling determined to participate in the wo...

The New York Times–bestselling author explores WWII Paris history and tells the stories of how women survived—or didn't—during the Nazi occupation.Paris in the 1940s was a place of fear, power, aggression, courage, deprivation, and secrets. During the occupation, the swastika flew from the Eiffel Tower and danger lurked on every corner. While Parisian men were either fighting at the front or captured and forced to work in German factories, the women of Par...

A PEOPLE BOOK OF THE WEEKWINNER OF THE JQ–WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE“A haunting tribute to survivors and those lost forever—and a reminder, in our own troubled era, never to forget.” —PeopleAn “exceptional” (The Wall Street Journal) and “poignant” (The New York Times) book in the tradition of rediscovered works like Suite Française and Th...

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • A 2026 Highlight in Financial Times • Evening Standard • The Bookseller"This is a scintillatingly good book. . . . Thrillingly immersive. . . . I’ve rarely felt such a sense of the historical moment. Or indeed the present moment. Because if ever a book were about now as well as then, it’s this one." —The Sunday TimesThis is the story...

"This is a beautifully written, insightful chronicle of a young girl's Holocaust survival. Though very private and personal, it nevertheless captures the common torments of children living through this disastrous civilizational breakdown.What makes this book unique is that the author pulls the reader into the story. We get to know her parents and other memorable characters for the kind of people they were. There is an immediacy in the writing that almost makes the reader a particip...

Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed gentleman, deplored democracy, and rejected the modern world outright. To Reck the Nazis were ruthless revolutionaries in Gothic drag, and helpless as he was to counter the spell they had cast on the German people, he felt compelled to record the corruptions of their rule. The result is less a diary than a sequence of stark and astonishing snapsh...