‘Thrilling … High-definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched’ SUNDAY TIMES‘This book is a triumph’ DAN SNOW9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile – originally designed to carry a nuclear warhead – and blasts into the skies. His name is Yuri Gagarin and he is ...

Drawing upon war diaries, court martial papers and interviews with veterans and family members, award-winning BBC journalist Stephen Walker explains how, often exhausted by battle, or suffering shell-shock, men who refused to fight were branded as cowards, and shot at dawn by a firing squad. From the cities and townlands of Ireland to the killing fields of the Western Front and Gallipoli, Forgotten Soldiers traces the lives of men who enlisted to fight an enemy but ended up being killed by...

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Some lines can't be crossed. Some battles can't be avoided.Merry Tamlin thought she could leave her past behind. For five years, the former special forces operative has been hiding in the shadows of Cowbridge, working security at the Blue Moon—a seedy nightclub where the rules are simple: stay detached, avoid trouble, and never look back.But when an old comrade begs for her help to rescue his kidnapped daughter, Merry is forced to confront the part of herse...

In Ireland's Call BBC journalist Stephen Walker charts the fascinating stories of 40 Irishmen who swapped the sports field for the battlefield - household names who gave up their blossoming careers to volunteer for the Great War.Using rare archive letters, memoirs and newspaper reports, this compelling book features the stories of sportsmen whose lives were tragically cut short in the mud of the Somme, the despair of Ypres and the heat of Gallipoli. It chronicles the remarkable ach...

Politician, peacemaker, persuader: John Hume was a titan of Irish history – a tireless architect of the Good Friday Agreement who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in ending decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. But who was the real John Hume? What motivated the former history teacher to reach beyond political lines? What sustained him during the bloodiest years of violence? How did he impel the IRA to end its long-running campaign? How did he convince presidents and prime min...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER‘A stunning book, among the most immediate and thrilling works of history I have ever read’At 8:15am on August 6th 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the temperature at its core rose to millions of degrees. Sixty-thousand buildings were obliterated. A third of the city’s population died, by heat, by the blast, and by a terrible new weapon in the history of warfare:...

A riveting, minute-by-minute account of the World War II bombing of Hiroshima, from early testing to the cataclysmic event and its aftermath.On a quiet Monday morning in August 1945, a five-ton bomb—dubbed Little Boy by its creators—was dropped from an American plane onto the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On that day, a firestorm of previously unimagined power was unleashed on a vibrant metropolis of 300,000 people, leaving one third of its population dead, i...

A history of the 1961 space race between the US & USSR and Yuri Gagarin's flight into space—"High definition history: tight, thrilling and beautifully researched" ( Sunday Times (London))." Beyond has the exhilaration of a fine thriller, but it is vividly embedded in the historic tensions of the Cold War, and peopled by men and women brought sympathetically, and sometime...

Irish Sunday Times BestsellerA true story of war, peace and friendship: a Nazi colonel and an Irish priestThe story begins in Rome at the outbreak of WWII, when ardent Nazi Herbert Kappler, SS Obersturmbanführer, and Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty would become adversaries in a real-life game of 'cat and mouse' of epic proportions. Hide and Seek chronicles the intimate and intensely personal war between them. A fiercely fought rivalry that would culminate in failed attempts by Ka...

Some Things Can't Be Traded.In Cowbridge's neon-lit alleys, survival is its own currency. Merry wants nothing more than to get through another shift as security at the Blue Moon Nightclub—but when Leanna hires her as a bodyguard for a job in Newbridge, she's dragged into a nightmare she can't ignore.The Grinders are more than a street gang. They're predators, carving up the desperate and vulnerable for profit in a ruthless organ trade. What starts as a simp...

Some lies can't be tolerated.All Merry Tamlin wanted was a night off. Just one.But while she's gone, a lethal designer drug is smuggled into the Blue Moon, leaving a body in its wake. When that doesn't close the club, the man behind it escalates matters.Now Damien is behind bars. Merry, injured, exhausted, and very much not a lawyer, is the only thing standing between the nightclub which has become the center of her world and the power of the Orbitals.She ca...